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Steve Hamm in
Abundant rains this year ended California’s three-year drought, but, long-term, the need for responsible water management and conservation continues. California Gov. Arnold Schwazenegger has asked the people of the state to reduce their water use by 20 percent by 2020.
In Sonoma County, one of the premium wine regions of the world, the competing demands for water from people, fish, and the wine industry requires the Sonoma County Water Agency to be smart about the way it manages water. It’s developing a new management system that gathers data from numerous sources and allows the water agency and its retailers to share data and coordinate the supply and demand of water.
What struck me when talking to leaders in Sonoma is how much collaboration and transparency matter in situations like this. With them, conflicts can be resolved. Without them, problems tend to end up being dealt with in court.
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It’s Water Week, so there’s plenty of water-related activity at IBM. Here are three items that are particularly interesting.
–The Nature Conservancy and IBM announced plans to launch a Web site called Rivers for Tomorrow, where watershed managers can map, analyze and share data about the health of local freshwater river basins to help out with cleanup programs.
–IBM’s World Community Grid, a network of PC owners helping scientists solve humanitarian challenges, announced three new projects, in China, Brazil, and the U.S.’s Chesapeake Bay.
–IBM Research has launched a project called Creek Watch, an iPhone application that enables people to help monitor the health of their local watershed. Whenever people pass a local waterway, they can snap a photo and report how much water and trash they see. The data is collected and shared with local authorities so they can respond to whatever’s going on. Here’s a blog post about the program.
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Erica Topolski in
It’s Energy Day at Start. More than 160 business, private sector, and academic leaders are gathering at historic Lancaster House in London to discuss, and in many cases debate, the idea of smarter energy for a sustainable future. Continue Reading »
California fruit grower Sun World International isn’t among the giants of agribusiness, but it punches above its weight class in global markets thanks in part to its use of business intelligence software. In fact, the Bakersfield, California-based company is one of the most pervasive users of data analytics that we’re aware of–in everything from farm operations and finance to sales and marketing. It’s also got an executive dashboard for tracking key performance metrics. “The notion of pervasive performance management is held up as an ideal, but there are few companies that actually do it. This is one of them,” says Tony Levy, a product marketing director in IBM’s Cognos business unit. Sun World International’s main suppliers of business intelligence software are IBM and Applied Analytix.
The company’s heavy reliance on data began five years ago after it was purchased by a private equity firm that brought in new management and insisted on improved performance. “These days, we ask questions, understand the numbers, and, most importantly, do something,” says Gordon Robertson, vice-president of sales and marketing.
From its 12,000 acres of land in California, Sun World International sells table grapes, stone fruit, peppers, and water melons worldwide. It also breeds its own varieties of plants and licenses its genetic intellectual property to other growers. Its brands including Superior Seedless grapes, Black Diamond plums, and Honeycot apricots. It employs about 7,000 people in the fields.
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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
