Schneider Electric and IBM today announced an agreement to develop technology and services that will integrate and manage a company’s physical infrastructure, IT assets, and business processes.

Two Schneider Electric companies — APC and TAC, both part of the company’s Critical Power & Cooling Services business unit — are developing software that will tie data center and building management systems to IBM’s Tivoli Monitoring energy management application. The combined offering, which is scheduled to be available next year, will provide one platform for end-to-end visibility and real-time management of these systems, the companies said.

By integrating APC’s InfraStruXure Central management software for the data center with TAC and IBM Tivoli software, administrators can correlate the dependencies of business processes and IT assets with the underlying physical infrastructure.

To that end, when the combined platform debuts in 2009, companies will be able to perform a number of tasks, including detecting and monitoring real-time changes in power and cooling to understand how assets may be affected by the change; tracking moves, additions, or changes to physical IT assets; optimizing utilization of power, cooling, and rack capabilities while right-sizing the IT environment; better predicting and avoiding potential downtime due to hardware failure or energy events; tracking historical information regarding IT asset usage and correlating power and cooling requirements to help with future data center planning; centralizing data center security, such as access control, intrusion detection, and digital video management; and gaining visibility into building management controls for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning.

Later this year, APC will roll out a new version of its InfraStruXure data monitoring tool, which, for the first time in APC’s history, will support non-APC equipment. It will also support 10 languages.

Those announcements follow that of another new offering from APC, unveiled late last week, called TradeOff tools. These decision support tools guide users through data center designs and ultimately propose the layout and equipment suggestions to improve overall performance, the company said.

The free tools include a simulation model of the data center that lets engineers see the impact of any changes prior to commissioning equipment, as well as a carbon calculator to estimate the impact of energy costs and a company’s overall carbon footprint. The software can also issue a statement of work with requirements outlines to help an organization get started designing the data center. APC offers its own consulting, as needed, as a fee-based service.

Coincidentally, IBM last week unveiled its Carbon Tradeoff Modeler, another application aimed at helping manufacturers and other businesses address energy concerns.

Collectively, these announcements feed into APC’s mission to dramatically simplify the way the data center is designed and managed, and to integrate power and energy requirements with IT system deployment. The initiative, which APC loosely calls “plant to plug,” encompasses the way that data is used and how the energy needed to manage it is created.

For example, businesses are deploying more and more servers to manage the digital data explosion, a situation that demands significant quantities of energy. Without enough power and cooling hardware to supply that equipment, many companies have had to put the brakes on server purchases.

“The idea of power and cooling [demands] slowing down server sales is a dramatic change and a dramatic risk to the industry,” said Aaron Davis, APC’s chief marketing officer and North American region president, during a press conference last week.

The only way to offset this trend is to simplify the data center through integration and standardization, he said. “We’ve entered the age of necessity where everyone needs access to the Internet, and IT cost per user keeps coming down. But the cost of power and cooling keeps going up, which is creating the age of anxiety.”

As a result, “measured metrics are critical to the future of power and cooling,” Davis said, a need APC is looking to fill with its new modeling tools.

Moreover, user companies must have visibility into their entire energy consumption to gain better control of that intake, an area Schneider and IBM are looking to address with their combined offerings.

Many of the enhancements coming down the line will integrate more power and cooling solutions to provide customers with a turnkey solution. The efforts are a direct result of Schneider Electric’s acquisition of APC in 2007. APC was combined with MGE UPS Systems to form the $3.5 billion Critical Power & Cooling Services unit, which includes UPS, precision cooling units, racks, physical security, and design and management software.

“In the next few months, Schneider Electric will be moving clearly in the direction of a solution-oriented company,” Laurent Vernerey, APC’s president and CEO, told reporters at last week’s press conference. “We will dramatically simplify the way the data center is designed and managed.”