Building a Smarter Planet. A Smarter Planet Blog.

If you love exploring lots of buildings and interesting infrastructure then visit Vegas!  Only here can you ride a gondola through a narrow canal, then hop a tram for the Eiffel tower or hail a cab for the Egyptian pyramid with its crazy inclinators that can whisk you up at an angle to the peak.

In today’s world, the physical infrastructure of everything from casinos to classroom campuses is both vast and complex. I am in Las Vegas today to announce how IBM is helping some of the world’s most complex organizations use IBM Smarter Planet technologies to be more efficient and sustainable, including the U.S. Air Force, the Louvre Museum, and the Los Angeles School District.

The U.S. Air Force is by far IBM’s largest smarter building implementation to date with more than 626 million square feet of real estate.  A recent Presidential Executive Order requires such agencies to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. According to an Oct.13 report from Pike Research, the DOD currently spends approximately $20 billion per year on energy. IBM TRIRIGA smarter building software will help make a dent in this number across the Air Force’s 170 locations.

The Louvre is Europe’s most visited museum, with a record breaking 8.8 million visitors in 2011. Currently, the museum staff handles more than 65,000 repairs and maintenance visits per year in this 650,000 square foot facility. We are using IBM Maximo software to automate their processes in order to preserve and protect their facilities and artwork while continuing to accommodate an ever growing number of visitors.

The Los Angeles School District is the nation’s second largest school district with a goal to become greener and more sustainable. This is no small feat for a school system with 800 campuses and 14,000 buildings. With the help of students, IBM Maximo, ESRI, and CitiSourced have enabled their smart phones to pinpoint problems and accelerate resolution.

I hope you are beginning to see a common thread behind these implementations. Just below the surface of fighter jets, invaluable artwork and busy students, is a demand for smarter, more efficient physical infrastructure.  Buildings, for example, account for 42% of the world’s energy use and are forecast to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet by 2025.  The good news is that no matter what type of building or equipment you may find, there is a tremendous amount of data available from this physical infrastructure that we can help analyze to drive efficiency. Beyond what we are announcing today, here are a few more exciting examples that are well underway:

• 30,000 cell towers in India for Bharti Infratel
• Pumps, valves, boilers, furnaces, compressors, tanks and turbines at an East African refinery for Kenyan Petroleum Refineries
• Illuminated manuscripts, wood sculptures, paintings, and tapestries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Conveyor belts at Schipol in Amsterdam

By better  “listening” to this data we can find new ways to squeeze out inefficiencies, resulting in more green, sustainable, cost-efficient buildings, bases, campuses, industrial complexes, airports, and even museums.

IBM can capture the big data picture better than any company on the planet while at the same time identify the smallest inefficiencies by sifting through this data to pinpoint the location of individual objects and associated anomalies.  And it does not matter if it is in Las Vegas, Paris, or Kenya.  At the end of the day we have the same opportunity world-wide to better listen to and improve to realize a more sustainable approach.