When Schneider Electric SE, the $26-billion French multinational energy company, wanted to embrace digital transformation, it decided the effort should be focused on more than just its own internal processes.

So the firm created its own digital unit with an eye toward supporting the entire business, including the security and the overall technology needs of its customers.

“For us, digital transformation was not just about digitizing ourselves, but it was also about augmenting the value proposition that we have for our customers,” said Hervé Coureil (pictured), chief digital officer at Schneider Electric. “It’s also about bringing in an ecosystem of partners that can really reinforce those value propositions. It’s about how we create a digital experience for our customers and partners that’s even better than what we have in the physical world.”

Coureil spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s Schneider Electric offices in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of the Zscaler Digital Transformation series. They discussed how Schneider Electric turned to Zscaler for network security and the true meaning of scale in the enterprise (see the full interview with transcript). (* Disclosure below.)

Need for mobile protection

A key element in Schneider Electric’s transformation is security. As the company deployed its digital initiatives, it also knew that maintaining a secure environment would be critical to success.

With 144,000 employees globally, the company focused on the issue of securing remote access to company systems. Schneider Electric turned to Zscaler Inc. and deployed its Zscaler App, a cloud-based mobile security product, as one of its solutions.

“We have employees that like to work from taxis and planes,” Coureil said. “We’ve been working with Zscaler on network-level security. We’ve tried to build an ecosystem both at the service level and at the solution level because the problem with security is you can have a lot of point solutions that would solve very narrow problems, but what really makes a difference is your ability to integrate.”

Coureil was previously the chief information officer at Schneider Electric for approximately eight years before assuming the CDO title. His organization combines information technology, internet of things, and the customer experience practices into one digital unit with 3,000 employees.

During the digital transformation journey, Coureil has learned that scale is not just about size.

“In today’s world, people have a misconception of scale that this is just size,” he said. “The secret sauce is how you scale. In digital, scale is about replicability, how easily you can replicate.”