blog comments powered by Disqus

24 October 2010

Green Technology for IT







The concept of, and discussion on, the carbon footprint originates from the Green movement and has been on the political agenda for some time.



It has recently been picked up by economists as well, an not just because of rising energy coss. A carbon footprint is the total set of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organisation, event or product. The carbon footprint of an individual, a nation, or an organisation is measured by undertaking a GHG emissions assessment. Once the size of a carbon footprint is known, a strategy can be devised to reduce it.

The mitigation of carbon emissions through the development of alternative projects such as solar or wind energy represents one way of managing the problem. A carbon footprint can be efficient, and effectively reduced by undertaking a number of measures:

  • life cycle Assessment (LCA) to accurately determine teh current carbon footprint
  • Identification of hotspots in terms of energy consumption and associated CO2 emissions.
  • Where possible, changing to another (renewable) energy source such as wind turbines, solar panels, or even nuclear power, however controversial this might be.
  • Optimisations of energy efficiency and, thus, reduction of CO2 emissions and reduction of other GHG emissions contributed from production processes
  • Identification of solutions to neutralise the CO2 emissions that cannot be eliminated by energy-saving measures.


Whatever the case, more and more businesses are going out of their way to show their Green face to the public. On the other han, the vast majority of businesses are only doing what they absolutely need to do in order to comply with regulations and reporting standards. 'Green' is still seen as a cost and not an investment. It is just part of the licence to operate.
Organisations are expected to include within their reports the impact that their business is having on climate change. This may also include how they are working to reduce this impact as well as justification when the impact ist large.

With carbon reporting high on the agenda, organisations need to look at ways of reducing their carbon footprint.

  • In the future, carbon emissions will be seen as a potential asset. High emissions may be taxed, but low emissions could enable emission allocations to be sold on as carbon credits on a carbon-trading platform
  • Organisations will need to look to carbon emissions in this way, monetising emissions as carbon credits and including these in their managerial and financial reports. Disclosure of emissions will become a standard reporting item for many busineses and effective carbon management will be required to maximise teh value of carbon assets.
  • Key areas for improvement need to be identified with a planned course of action. Regular reassessment should b carried aout to ensure that targets are being met and to identiy new opportunities for improvement.


With the increaded focus on the impact of human activity on global warming and physical resources, there is greater scrutinity of the role IT is playing. Green technology is essentially focused around reducing technology's footprint

This means reducing energy usage and wastage, increasing recycling of redundant hardware as well as enabling collaboration so that the need for travel, particularly via air transport, is reduced.

Virtualization technologies are making it possible to host many virtual machines on a single server, which in turn requires less hardware and energy usage than the equivalent physical machines. This therefore reduces the energy and physical footprint in data centres.

See the appropriate site of VmWare that focusses on that topic.

Video collaboration / telepresence technologies will make collaboration and meetings so realisitic that the need for travel will be reduced, leading to cost savings as well as energy impact.

See for example the offering of TATA communications for Telepresence services across the globe and information about Telepresence Options in general.


Check out the CISCO Carbon Savings Calculator for Telepresence Usage your enterprises

After initial outlay, enterprises stand to make significant cost savings as highlighted in the previous two points, and they may well benefit from any tax breaks provided by their respect government.

Companies that embrace Green technology stand to get positive publicity in the media, gain new environmentally conscious customers and increase or sustain market share.


One Example of Enterprise power saving solutions can be found at JOULEX.

More information can be found on SCRIBD. One example is the whitepaper from IDC on Going Green with IT technology

The recent research results on optimizing the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) factor for running datacenters can be found in the publications of the research lab documents of T-Systems and Intel: http://www.datacenter2020.de/

Forget every argument and industry lobby previously put forward regarding the evolution of green energy alternatives. For Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, if a technology doesn't meet the "Chindia test" - meaning that it is cheaper than the current status quo in China and India - then it is not a viable, scalable, and cost-effective long-term alternative. Anything that will uproot the global reliance on oil or coal must be less expensive, else it will never gain traction in the global marketplace. Vinods says the main problem that sustainable energy-production has to solve is to store energy safely and recall it on demand. See additional aspects from Stanford entrepreneurship series with Vinod Khosla on Energy:




The energy storage problem and possible solutions are clearly explained here.

Using Cars as energy storages of the future is currently under investigation in several joint research programs between energy and automotive industry.

See the information on IBM's initiative Smarter planet for smart grids in particular.

You can also follow the SMART GRID BLOG

18 October 2010

17 October 2010

GOOGLE Services for the Enterprise - Check them out

Google currently is offering four services for Enterprises:

Google Enterprise Search
(See the latest news about Googles search appliance: bridge in the cloud)


Google Apps for business
See the latest hints and tips on Google Apps Blog

Google Postini Services
(See the 'Q3’10 spam & virus trends from Postini Services')

Google Earth & maps
(See the latest release of Google earth for enterprises)

When the rubber hits the road

Flake from the 1st panel disussion with Don Tapscot at GOOGLE atmosphere 2010 near Paris:

Visions without execution are illusions.
Speed dramatically matters. Enterprise IT has stopped !
And what is with trust ...?

Todays collaboration abolishes old leadership style if the leadership style does not change.

Volumes and culture in a collaborative environment are most important not technic.

Evolution is very paradox. In the era of collaboration transaction costs will go down dramatically (but they will not reach the bottomline of zero).

Companies should focus on what thy can do best. Organizations should focus on best practices.

Is work in the future unbound from time and location ? No: you are always at a certain place in a given time .

The normal user spents approx. 13 hours a week working on e-mail.

In 2013
75 % of mobiles are integrated part of common users workstyle in the US and Japan.
50 % will be the number for Europe in 2013
and
> 40 % will be the numer of users in Asia (ex. Japan).

There is no thing like 'personal productivity' any more. Every thing from now on is collaborative.
The more a company works collaborative there more innovative the company is.

GOOGLE says its datacenters have a

- geospatial
- logical
- replicative
- tranparent

redundancy builtin .

GOOGLE has announced a two-step verification method to authenticate users.
Its done by a soft-token with RSA algorythm generation and is avialable for the most common mobile phone platforms.

Interestingly shortly after GOOGLEs announcement AMAZON AWS published a similar function that is hosted on AWS here.


With GOOGLE DOCS you can upload any filetype by now. You can collaborate on any file and data then automatically.

GOOGLE will announce later in 2010 the seamless integration of GOOGLE Docs with Microsoft Office 2007 upwards.
You can the as an Google Docs user have the total office integration with cloud based collaboration options.

12 October 2010

Google Atmosphere 2010

Don Girouard

40 % aller i-phone werden heute im BIZ genutzt.
2013 werden Smartphones die Laptops und desktop zahlenmäßig überholt haben.
57 % aller Blackberry Nutzer wollen ein anderes Gerät.
2 Millionen i-pads wurden in den letzten 2 Monaten verkauft.

Jeden Tag werden 200.000 neue Android Geräte aktiviert.
GOOGLE Apps nutzen zur Zeit ca. 3.000.000 Unternehmen. Das Wachstum beschleunigt sich.
Nutzende Unternehmen sind zur Zeit noch SMALL und MEDIUM BIZ.
Es gibt ca. 30.000.000 Nutzer von GOOGLE Apps (d.h. ca. 10 Benutzer pro Unternehmen).

40 % aller Universitäten in den USA sind komplett bei GOOGLE und nutzen Apps.

Es gibt keine alte Version von Software in der Cloud; es gibt kein Upgrade auf neue Versionen.
Google Apps haben in der letzten Zeit ca. 120 neues features bekommen.
Google Apps beinhaltet 60 neue Apps; 200 neue Apps sind in GOOGLE marketplace verfügbar.
(z.B. ZOHO, Attlassian etc.)



Phasen der Optimierung in IT-Unternehmen

1. Do the same things cheaper
(e-mail billiger, server billiger)
2. Do complete new things
(DTP, electronic docs, collaboration)
3. Buy capacity on demand
(storage (GB), servers (CPU), Datebases etc. , realtime interaction)
... and assemble ist everywhere (because Internet is there)
4. move away from owned facilities
Ende der Ära der eignen Facilities
- zu teuer (hohe Fixkosten für Sicherheitstechnik, Energiekosten, Brandschutz etc.)
- Nicht flexible genug (skaliert nicht)
- zerbrechlich
- durchlässing (am Ende nicht sicher genug)

Neue Produktivität
- Geolocation awareness
Mapping services, tracing services
(Google Maps ist heute in 129 Ländern weltweit verfügbar, Tendenz steigend)
- Realtime translation
(Translation ist seit 6 Jahren ein feature von GOOGLE mail und GOOGLE docs)
- Voice to text
30 % aller GOOGLE searches werden heute von mobilen Geräten aus getätigt.
- GOOGLE EARTH
bietet völlig neue Möglichkeiten der globalen Koordination
(z.B. Reisende / Hilfstruppen aus/in Krisengebiete zu lotsen)
Fa. VALEO nutzt z.B. EARTH mit einer ANDROID phone APP, um alle relevanten
corporate informations (People, sites, countries, offices, customer, contracts etc.) zu
visualisieren und jedem autorisierten Mitarbeiter auf dem mobile phone darzustellen.
- Fa. Pago und MOTOROLA nutzen GOOGLE Apps

Don Tapscott
(Think Tank nGenerea, Book Makrowikonomics)

'Turning point' in der Gesellschaft ist erreicht.
Stagnation aller alten Industrien erkennbar.

Web2.0
- Neue Unternehmen entstehen sehr schnell durch Möglichkeiten weltweiter Collaboration
- Eine Wandlung von Websites hin zu globale Plattformen vollzieht sich zur Zeit

-Next Generation

-Soziale Revolution
YouTube löst MTV ab
Facebook hat ungeahnten Erfolgt
Wikipedia ist Informationsquelle Nummer 1
FLICKR
Blogger sticht CNN aus
Huffington Post überflügelt NewYork Times

Economics of collaboration
industrial age (Transaction cost oriented)
Extended enterprise (..)
BIZWeb
Mass collaboration

Imperatives today
Collaboration
OPENNESS
SHARING
INDEPENDENCE
INTEGRITY

CLIMATE WATCH
Eye on earth

WORLD Economic Forum in Davos
Global Redesign initiative

Change in universities
Drill and Kill versus student focussed
Teacher focussed
one way versus customized
student is alone versus collaborative

Meta Universität
s.a. Charles Vest , MIT

Government
Bürokratie des Industriezeitalters ist am Ende

Neue Ansätze durch OPENDATA siehe OPENDATA.ORG
Implementierung z.B. bei : Neighbourhood knowledge of L.A. (NKLA)

@work
Heute noch wieitgehend nach Command and control organisiert
Leadership and Control is still a synonym today
The new world is not document oriented (nicht Sharepoint) !
It is not the olde knowledge management (that is unsufficient and broken)
Old managment style is a barrier for the cecessary flow flow collaboration

Deliberation
collaboration decision management