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Karl Roche in
Today we open the doors for 9 days at the IBM Summit at Start, just as a YouGov poll of over 2,000 consumers revealed that 47 per cent of British adults feel the plethora of information on sustainability is confusing and often conflicting.
The business community didn’t fair much better as 50 per cent of the public rate the way organisations convey their sustainability policies as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. How can we change that?
May be changing that perception over the 9 days of IBM Summit at Start is asking a lot but we can begin to get things rolling. The key to the event is asking, what can sustainability do for business? This is a more authentic way to approach the subject so as to arrive at a place where the output makes sense to business and it’s consumers.
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Karl Roche in
Karl’s note: The following is a guest post by Jim Porell, Distinguished Engineer and System z Evangelist.
Jim Porell, Distinguished Engineer
System zEnterprise – the new server on the block, but in doing so, taking the best of many servers and putting them together as a “System of Systems.” Its goal is to make a business smarter. Let’s look at how.
Moore’s law has demonstrated that annually each server platform should get faster and cheaper on a regular basis and to that end, most servers, IBM and otherwise, have done just that. From a customer point of view, many have built silos of operations. For example, transaction processing on a mainframe, data warehouse on UNIX servers and web portals on PC servers. Across a business, data is copied regularly, there are multiple operational domains and there could be many, many servers, eating up valuable floor space, energy and administrative personnel.
Big Iron never dies. Forty-six years after the first IBM mainframe models were introduced, our company is launching a new generation of the machines today in New York City. The zEnterprise series offers the kinds of performance you’d expect: The top-of-the line machine is equipped with 96 powerful processors running at a blazing-fast 5.2Ghz, together capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second. In an era when PC servers run tens of applications simultaneously in virtualization mode, this model can run run more than 100,000. It’s like a computing cloud in a box.
While the sheer perform
ance numbers for zEnterprise are impressive, it also represents a major step forward in our efforts to make corporate computing smarter.
A key element of the launch is IBM Unified Resource Manager, a software innovation built into the systems that integrates a mainframe with Unix and PC blade servers as if they’re a single machine, with all of the security and reliably of the mainframe. We believe that in the not-too-distant future, the modern data center will no longer be a vast array of different types of devices and chunks of software but, instead, will be best understood as a single computing system, encompassing processing, memory, storage, networking, and all of the software and services that go with it. Conceptually and operationally, it will be one large machine. Unified Resource Manager is an important step in that direction.
This isn’t just some fancy technology trick that we’re doing because we can. The world of business computing is in the midst of a profound shift, driven by a convergence of forces. Digital intelligence is being injected into the world’s physical systems through pervasive instrumentation and global interconnectivity. That’s generating an exponential increase in the volume, quality, and speed of data. At the same time, doing business is growing in complexity and the pace of business has quickened. Companies are under intense pressure to respond to the expectations of a new generation of young people raised on the Internet, the rapid emergence of new markets, and intensifying competition.
To deal with all of these developments, enterprises need to become smarter–gathering more and better information, making sense of it, and acting wisely and immediately on what they learn. Continue Reading »
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vineeta durani in
This year alone, more than 1200 exabytes of digital information will be created. And with just one exabyte equal to one trillion novels, companies are faced with the challenge of getting their arms around massive amounts of data. Data that is being generated by their internal business applications, their IT systems, social networks and various other external sources such as the nearly 1 trillion internet-connected devices.
While some organizations struggle with this deluge of data, others are turning it into opportunity. Today, IBM is launching a new series of client success stories, shining a light on how businesses and governments from around the world are turning mountains of data into concrete opportunities to better serve their clients, improve citizen service and innovate in ways that have never been possible. And with more than 250,000 organizations around the world using IBM analytics, this is just the beginning.
Analyze This: DC Water
How do you monitor a water system that in part dates back to the mid 1800s? How do emergency responders know that the fire hydrant next to a burning building will work?
The answer doesn’t lie in expensive infrastructure projects or overhauling of water management systems — it lies in connecting the dots with relevant data. Predictive analytics is helping DC Water analyze enormous amount of data on weather conditions, maintenance and hundreds of other variables to uncover usage patterns and spot problems, like water main breaks, before they occur.
To learn more, visit the new IBM business analytics channel on You Tube: www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics
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jamesmathewson in
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Wayne Balta, vice president, environmental affairs and product safety at IBM. It emphasizes that sustainability is not a new concept for IBM, nor is it a short-term commitment. Sustainability is woven into the fabric of IBM’s business.
IBM just issued its 20th environmental report–an annual tradition that began in 1990, long before most companies climbed on the “green” bandwagon or became transparent about their environmental activities. In addition to climate change and energy efficiency, IBM reports on pollution prevention, waste management, material selection and water stewardship to capture the full scope of its environmental impact.
In 2009, IBM’s energy conservation projects across the company delivered savings equal to 5.4 percent of our total energy use (exceeding our goal of 3.5%). These conservation projects also saved almost $27 million in energy expense.
From the way IBM runs its business, to the products and solutions we sell, to the way we manage our supplier relationships, IBM uses its expertise, global reach, innovation and technology in our commitment to protect the environment. Sustainability is systemic to IBM’s business along with technology and services that promote the company’s vision for a smarter planet.
The company looks to design energy-efficient offerings to help provide clients with products that protect the environment. Consider data centers. Toyota Motor’s 20, 000 square foot data in California uses a high-tech system of sensors developed by IBM to detect wasted energy on the manufacturing floor. The sensors deliver a color-coded 3D view of where heat is being produced. This same system helped IBM cut its 2009 energy consumption and has saved nearly 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions for clients.
IBM is partnering with companies around the world on thermal management, virtualization, consolidation, software, and even construction to improve data center energy efficiency. And the Green500 just put out its 2010 list of the most energy efficient supercomputers; IBM dominates the list with 17 of the top 20.
Our sustainability also stretches to the realm of patents. The Eco-Patent Commons creates a free exchange of intellectual property to solve environmental challenges. Since the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM launched the Eco-Patent Commons in 2008, 12 companies have joined the effort, contributing more than 100 patents to protect the environment, and we strongly encourage other companies to contribute.
For some companies, corporate responsibility is merely an adjunct; a set of activities disconnected from the core business. At IBM, the company’s strategic business priorities are tightly aligned with our social responsibility efforts. This shared ambition is to enable the systems that make life on this planet more efficient, accessible and sustainable.
Wayne Balta is vice president, environmental affairs and product safety, IBM
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jamesmathewson in
Editor’s Note: Following is an essay co-authored by Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux for IBM, and Jean Staten Healy, director of cross-IBM Linux strategy for IBM. It describes the central place Linux plays in building a smarter planet, and builds on a presentation about the role of Linux in Smarter Systems, which the two IBM executives gave at the recent Red Hat Summit.
What do you think about when you read or hear the word “smart” when it is applied to computers? How about a supercomputer? If any machine is smart, a supercomputer is, right?. According to a study released by the University of California at Berkeley in May, 2010, 470 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux, the open source operating system. That’s 91%. Evidently the people who decided to use Linux for these computers were pretty smart too.
As we think about all the ways where we can work together to create a Smarter Planet, Linux has a very natural role. First, Linux runs on more kinds of hardware than any other operating system. So if we are talking about tying together disparate systems to deliver better, more accurate, and more predictive health care, Linux can power the hardware and software to maintain the information repositories, do the data mining, and perform the analytics. That is, Linux can help provide the intelligence we will need and expect in our complex and sophisticated 21st century systems.
Linux runs on the smallest devices all the way up to the fastest supercomputers, as noted above. Linux today powers smart phones, Netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers in datacenters, but also home automation and many embedded systems. Linux will be at the heart of smart electrical grids that allow utilities to reduce waste, remotely manage and monitor use, and help reduce costs to consumers. Linux will increasingly be part of the instrumentation that provides the data we will use to tune and optimize not just our electrical grids, but also our water systems, supply chains, and factories, to name a few examples.
As the data is collected from the sensors, Linux can help ensure that it goes where it needs to go to do the most good. In order to reduce pollution, cars need to be inspected and kept off the roads until they are compliant with emission standards. Linux can power websites where citizens can pay fees and schedule inspection appointments in a low friction manner. Then once the inspections are complete, Linux systems can push the data to local and regional authorities, but also to repositories and software that measure not only compliance but perform data analysis. This will yield important information to further improve the system, and reduce pollution even more. Our systems need to be more interconnected, and Linux can help them be so.
Linux is global and supports many languages and locales. The tools needed to create a Smarter Planet must run in the heterogeneous environments that we have today. Linux is a big part of how we instrument, interconnect, and derive intelligence from the information around us. As we optimize the systems we have today and develop entirely new ones to solve problems in better ways, don’t be surprised to see Linux inside.
Dr. Robert S. Sutor: Vice President, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group
Jean Staten Healy: Director, Cross-IBM Linux Strategy, IBM Systems and Technology Group
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Karl Roche in
Yesterday I mentioned the opening of the new lab in Manchester.
Today I arrived in Manchester and spoke to some of the development team about the work they do and the changes they have seen coming into IBM.
Don’t forget, you can watch the brief opening remarks from Manchester tomorrow on Livestream at 11:30am BST.
Inside the lab with Technical Architects, Miles Howson and Geraint North.
Ross Keeping talks about his new role as Program Manager and working in a global organisation
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The Web makes it much easier to figure out what consumers really think about your company and products–making the marketer’s job less of an art and more of a science. There are a variety of handy techniques for gathering information from the Web, including software and services that measure brand reputation and the public reaction to individual product launches. Now, thanks to the latest new capabilities coming from the analytics community, these tools are becoming even more powerful.
This week, IBM’s software folks released a new package aimed at making it much easier for marketers to gather and interpret what’s being said online–and act on it. The software gathers comments made about products from a wide variety of sources including Facebook, Twitter, wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds. It considers not only typed comments but the graphical emoticons that people frequently attach to their missives. “Short messages are fairly emotionless, in general. To compensate, people use emoticons to convey how they really feel,” says Erick Brethenoux, vice president of corporate development at IBM’s SPSS subsidiary. “These symbols are meaningful in their own way, so we wanted to include them.” Here’s a demonstration of how we interpret the intent of emoticons.
Text analysis is improving, too. Different industries have their own lingo. The word “security,” for instance, means something quite different in financial services than it does in home electronics. So our programmers created dozens of specialized taxonomies for fields ranging from life sciences and banking to insurance and consumer electronics.
The software package enables companies to integrate Web info into data models along with their own internal data, including information harvested from customer profiles, transaction records, e-mails, SMS text messages, call center notes, and survey results.
But while it’s valuable to know what consumers, in general, think about your products, it’s even more useful to know what an individual customer thinks at the moment when it matters the most–when they decide to do business with you or not. Marketers call this “the moment of truth.”
Brethenoux learned this lesson through personal experience… Continue Reading »
Posted by
Karl Roche in
Later this week IBM opens a new lab in United Kingdom. Manchester to be precise.
Rod Adkins, Senior VP, Systems and Technology Group, traveled to Manchester (at the risk of being stranded thanks to the ash cloud) to cut the ribbon and welcome the lab into IBM.
Manchester Lab in the heart of the city
The lab creates systems software for the Power system, focusing on privacy, virtulisation and opimisation – so clients can manage workloads and reduce storage costs.
The IBM Lab has its origins in Transitive, a spin-off company from University of Manchester, acquired by IBM in 2009 and many of the Engineers are former graduates of the University. The acquisition formed part of IBM’s ongoing strategy to help clients optimise the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilisation of the servers that run them.
I spoke to a couple of the guys at the lab last week who are looking forward to the new challenges and opportunities that being part of IBM brings. They are already working with teams across the globe, so this is no outpost but a core part of our integrated team that is working on enabling better and quicker systems migration and consolidation.
So tomorrow I’ll be taking a train up to Manchester to see the guys and video a few of them, hopefully if I get time I’ll post a couple before the event tomorrow.
Lots more on the website about Smarter Systems.
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