Schneider Electric has announced the appointment of Jay Owen as senior vice president of its IT Division in North America. Owen has served as interim head of the IT Division since January 2016. He will be based in West Kingston, Rhode Island.

In this role, Owen will lead commercialization of Schneider Electric’s integrated IT infrastructure and software offers. This includes a wide variety of products that provide power and availability solutions for IT and communications technologies under the company’s APC brand. With the largest community of partners tailoring solutions for home and business networks, APC protects critical information and data for individuals and businesses.

As the world embraces the digital economy, the data center has become the center of life. Digitization and the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) will put significant demands on IT infrastructure. Owen will help Schneider Electric customers realize the benefits of the company’s innovative connected, reliable and efficient solutions, services and expertise to help simplify and automate infrastructure operation and management, and transform IT from back-end cost centers to agile, strategic assets to support business growth.

“As the world becomes more connected, growth in the cloud and at the edge are driving distributed architecture that requires managing data in a new way to ensure infrastructure can quickly adapt to support the future of computing; Jay brings more than 20 years of experience to help support the massive, disruptive change that is occurring across the industry,” said Annette Clayton, CEO and president, Schneider Electric North America. “His expertise in improving enterprise IT infrastructure availability and efficiency positions him well to support our customers in realizing the value of reliability and operational efficiency across the broadest portfolio of innovative interconnected solutions.”

Owen joined Schneider Electric in 2007 through the acquisition of APC. Prior to this role, he held several leadership positions within the Schneider Electric IT Division, including vice president of U.S. data center solutions and vice president of government and inside sales. He has more than 20 years of experience assisting customers to improve their enterprise IT infrastructure availability and efficiency.

Owen holds a Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Civil Engineering with a minor in Management of Technology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.