Schneider Electric SE has named Steven Santini as Vice President of Secure Power for Sub-Saharan Africa, tapping a South Africa-born executive with more than 15 years in IT infrastructure to spearhead the company’s digital resilience strategy across a region where demand for reliable power and data capacity is surging.
The appointment places Santini at the helm of one of Schneider’s most strategically significant divisions, Secure Power, which designs and delivers the operational technologies that underpin data centres, edge computing environments, and critical infrastructure. The division serves as the connective tissue between energy reliability and digital availability in markets where both remain chronically undersupplied.
Santini returns to the African continent after nearly seven years with Schneider Electric’s UK and Ireland operations, where he rose to IT Channel Director and fundamentally reoriented the business.
Under his watch, the unit pivoted away from hardware-centric sales toward a solutions-led model, a transformation he now intends to replicate, at scale, across Sub-Saharan Africa.
“I strongly believe we should not be selling products, we should be delivering outcomes,” Santini said. “When we understand the full technology stack and the workloads our customers are running, the conversation shifts from racks and power distribution units to business performance, resilience, and sustainability. That is where real value lies.”
Before taking the regional role, Santini led global strategic alliances at Schneider, building the methodologies that power enterprise data centers, prefabricated infrastructure solutions, and next-generation sustainability software.
His background spans compute, storage, and software-defined solutions, a broad technical fluency that analysts say is increasingly essential as African enterprises grapple with hybrid IT environments and the operational complexity they bring.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s data centre market has attracted significant capital in recent years, driven by rising internet penetration, cloud adoption, and hyperscaler interest in the continent. Yet persistent challenges, unreliable grid power, skilled-labour shortages, and fragmented vendor ecosystems continue to complicate deployment and raise the stakes for vendors positioned as infrastructure partners rather than product suppliers.
Santini acknowledged the complexities directly, framing relationship capital as the region’s critical currency. “Africa operates on relationships,” he said. “People buy from people, and trust is everything. Our priority is to rebuild and strengthen our ecosystem, our partners, alliances, and customers, so that we create a strong foundation for sustainable growth through 2026 and beyond.”
His immediate mandate centres on consolidating and expanding Schneider’s partner and alliance network across the subcontinent, establishing what he describes as the foundational ecosystem necessary before more advanced, outcome-based solution strategies can take hold. Once that base is secured, Santini said, the region will be positioned to accelerate toward top-tier performance within the Secure Power global hierarchy.
In the role, Santini and his team will oversee strategy across data centres, edge environments, industrial applications, and critical infrastructure, with sustainability woven into each pillar, a priority that aligns with Schneider’s broader corporate commitments on carbon and energy efficiency.
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