Search Results for: fujitsu

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Fujitsu Siemens and the Zero Watt PC!

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Fujitsu Siemens announced their 0 Watt (as in zero Watt) PC at CeBit this week.

I asked Fujitsu Siemens’ Green IT Coordinator and Spokesman, Dr Bernd Kosch to come on the show to talk to us about the thinking behind this announcement and he very generously agreed!

Of course the PC does consume more than 0 Watts when operational, however, the clever bit is that unlike standard PCs which consume anywhere from 1 Watt to 5 Watts and up when in standby, the new Fujitsu consumes 0 Watts in standby!

Combine this with one of Fujistu Siemens’ 0 Watt monitors (also 0 Watts in standby), roll out policies which put all PCs into standby after hours and you drastically reduce your energy footprint (many office computers are used no more than 8 hours a day and not at all at weekends)!

The bad news? The computers won’t be available to buy until this summer.

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GreenMonk talks Eco Labels with Fujitsu Siemens’ Bernd Kosch

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Fujitsu Siemens announced last week new Eco Labels they are launching for their goods.

Eco labels are something I have written about previously on GreenMonk and I believe they are vital to helping consumers make informed choices when buying electronics.

I was interested in learning more so I invited their head of Green IT, Dr. Bernd Kosch to come on the show to discuss. He graciously accepted.

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Greenmonk’s Inaugural Cool Award: Fujitsu Siemens

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A couple of months ago I got the chance to chat with Fujitsu Siemens Computer’s chief technology officer (CTO), Dr Joseph Reger, who leads the company’s sustainability initiatives. We went over a fair amount of ground, but one thing that stuck with me was a new technology that came to the market last month – monitors that consume zero power when on standby. Let me just say that again – computer monitors that consumer zero watts on standby. When not in use DC power shuts down completely.
Anyone that has checked the power consumption of their electronic devices, using a Kill-a-Watt monitor, for example, knows just how greedy devices on standby can be (TVs and set-top boxes = bad news). And we have a lot of them in every home and office. According to FSC’s press release:

“Reducing European Union-wide power consumption through the adoption of electrical goods that use zero watts in standby mode would save an estimated 35 Terawatt hours per year according to the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung) – while the EU Stand-by Initiative reports estimates that stand-by power accounts for about 10 percent of the electricity use in homes and offices of the EU Member States.”

In other words, standby power is a problem very much worth solving. This is innovation at work and I commend the engineers at FSC for their efforts. Now if they can just apply the same technology to every other device I use…

When I first heard about the SCENICVIEW ECO device, I thought it had to be worth an award. So I thought why not award it? We need to work out what the COOL award means (Greenmonk probably needs a logo, for it, for example), but for now I would just like to say well done FSC – and congratulations. You are worthy winners of the first Greenmonk cool award for finding ways to lower global carbon emissions and energy consumption.

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Ariba’s AribaLive conference reviewed

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AribaLive 2013

I attended the AribaLive event in Berlin last week – this is the European conference for Ariba customers and partners to share stories, network and learn from one another.

Ariba is a company which provides electronic sales and procurement solutions for companies. There are over 1 million companies in 190 countries using Ariba. Customer companies mentioned or presenting included Clariant, Solvay, Disney, Deutsche Bank, Astra Zeneca, Fujitsu, Aviva and EADS. Naturally I was curious to hear how their customers fared from dematerialising parts of their buying and selling processes.

I wasn’t totally clear on some of the advantages the Ariba offers buyers and sellers until Ariba President Kevin Costello, in his keynote explained it with a good analogy to the likes of Facebook, Amazon and eBay. As Costello said, Facebook has completely changed how people connect/reconnect. Similarly, eBay and Amazon have totally transformed how people shop for goods. I knew exactly what he meant as I’ve recently bought a new camera. I started by checking camera review sites and Amazon reviews to find the best camera for my needs. I then went to both eBay and Amazon to identify the best deal, from the most reputable seller. Being able to see peer reviews not just of the camera, but of the sellers as well, meant I was very confident when I decided to buy my secondhand camera, that I would get a good product at a good price.

In the same way, Costello said, the Ariba Network brings huge transparency to enterprise buyers and sellers, allowing them to make purchasing, or sales decisions more efficiently and with fewer concerns. In fact, the consumerisation of business commerce was a term used throughout the event.

Several customer presentations followed with organisations like Spanish building company FCC mentioning that they both source €2 billion, and cut 80,000 electronic invoices with their Ariba system annually. They estimate they are saving 10% per annum by using Ariba.

Apart from the efficiencies of using electronic solutions, how else does one benefit (to the tune of 10%, for example) by using Ariba?

invoice

Well part of the answer was provided in the talk given by EADS Vice President of Accounts Payable, Bob McCartney. He talked about the cost of dealing with incoming invoices for EADS. According to McCartney, dealing with an invoice manually costs EADS €15, running it through OCR brings the price down to €4 per invoice, while the price of dealing with e-invoices is €2. That is massive – electronic invoicing is half the cost of OCR’d invoices and seven and a half times cheaper than manual invoices. Right there you see a huge business case for e-invoicing.

Other advantages of electronic invoicing outlined by McCartney were – a recurring 22% cost saving, increasing on-time payment of suppliers, improved visibility/forecasting of the company’s cash position, and improved relations with suppliers (more process transparency, as well as on-time payments).

Finally, Ariba’s Supplier Risk Management solution was interesting to learn about as well. This solution allows users to, for example, figure out in the event of a natural disaster in a distant part of the world, what the potential impact may on your organisations supply chain. Though a more interesting use case, given it can drill down several layers into your supply chain may be avoiding the use of conflict minerals in your products, for example.

Full disclosure – Ariba paid my travel and accommodation to attend this event.

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With great power comes great responsibility – or, Cloud companies need to get on-board

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Spiderman

With great power comes great responsibility

This great quote from the movie Spider-Man, is just as true for technology, as it is for superheroes.

Technology has made possible tremendous changes in our quality of life in the last couple of decades. Everything from surgery to transportation, education to construction, space exploration and most other fields of human endeavour now depend heavily on IT. However, these great advances in our knowledge and abilities comes at a cost.

Information Technology’s carbon footprint, estimated by Gartner to be 2% of global carbon emissions in 2007, is rapidly increasing and by some estimates may even double by 2020. This is obviously an unsustainable situation. ICT, which can help so many organisations to reduce their carbon footprint, should itself be an shining example of low emissions.

To this end, the EU commission’s new ICT Footprint initiative is to be lauded. The announcement of the project on EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes blog gave the following details of the initiative:

This is why the European Commission has persuaded three leading standards development organisations and a prominent greenhouse gas accounting initiative to pool their measurement efforts. Under our new initiative these organisations will examine the whole sector, the whole lifecycle and the scalability of these methods.

That means measuring everything from the supply of raw materials to their recycling. Measuring not only what it takes to make products like a laptop, but also the impact of services like hosting data in the cloud. It means that in the near future we will be able to measure the ICT environmental footprint of whole cities or countries, including the positive environmental effects that ICT enables.

Several major ICT companies and organisations from Europe, Asia and the US are now trialling such measurement solutions. And from this month onwards, nearly 30 players have joined the European Commission to broaden and speed up the effort. We call on more and more such players to get involved.

It is tremendous to see this kind of global leadership from the EU. While this only applies to the EU, it does require the development of measurement and reporting systems for whole IT ecosystems and that can only be a good thing. In time, the hope would be that these systems are used well beyond the EU and by all IT providers.

The initial participants in the organisation are some of the better known large IT companies – BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Cisco, Hitachi, Telefonica, Fujitsu, SAP, Nokia, AMD, Dell, HP, etc. However, notably absent are the major Cloud providers. Where are Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, VMWare, RackSpace, Salesforce, even Google who have gone furthest arguably in reporting and reducing their emissions, are not participants.

I have lamented many times on this blog the lack of transparency of Cloud companies and they continue to prove me correct. Unfortunately.

Transparency around energy use and emissions is coming, have no doubt. Cloud companies will eventually have to report this information. They will be dragged into it screaming and kicking, but it will happen. Then we will be able to finally decide which provider to use based not just on price, but also on their impact.

In the meantime, if you are interested in reducing the impact of your Cloud computing, you could do worse than to check out MastodonC – a company that “selects the most efficient and sustainable location for your Hadoop job” and/or Greenqloud – a company offering public compute cloud using only renewable energy to power their cloud (their data centers are based in Iceland where 100% of the electricity comes from hydro and geothermal sources).

Photo Credit Greg and Mellina

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Symantec need to stop hiding their Green light under a bushel

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Enrique Salem, Symantec CEO, at Symantec Vision 2010

I attended Symantec’s Vision 2010 event in Barcelona yesterday and I found it to be hugely frustrating!

Symantec are one of the world’s largest computer security companies with 31,000 customers, 18,400 employees (PDF), and revenue in 2009 of $6.2 billion.

At yesterday’s Vision event however, they missed lots of great opportunities to talk up their Green story! I sat through the keynote from CEO Enrique Salem and presentations from the business unit leads and there was not one mention of the word Sustainability or even Green.

Deepak Mohan at Symantec Vision 2010

Deepak Mohan at Symantec Vision 2010

Deepak Mohan, SVP of the Information Management Group came closest when he mentioned efficiencies associated with de-duplication, eliminating redundancy, reducing data transfer and more efficient (that word again) search. Guys, these are obvious Green wins!

Things improved considerably in the afternoon when Fujitsu, a Symantec customer, spoke about the payback from installing a hosted email filtering solution from Symantec. Before the installation, Fujitsu were receiving in excess of 2m emails per day. Between 90-95% of these emails were spam. After the rollout of the email filtering solution, Fujitsu are now receiving 5-10% of their previous email load per day. As a consequence they were able to reduce their email infrastructure from sixteen servers down to two. Furthermore, they were able to reduce their network link requirements and their storage requirements for email. And finally they were able to free up IT resources who previously were tasked with managing the email infrastructure. This is a big Green win!

My Symantec Vision 2010 conference badge

My Symantec Vision 2010 conference badge

Later in the afternoon I was especially heartened to have a one-to-one session with Symantec VP of Global Solutions, Jose Iglesias. Jose is the guy raising/waving the Green flag within Symantec. He informed me that Symantec have used their own technologies to reduce the electricity bill in their data centers by $3m (10%) per annum!

How do they do this?
Symantec has software for helping manage computer clusters which can help you reduce the number of computers in a cluster without affecting your SLA’s.

Also, according to Jose, storage costs can represent between 25-75% of a data center’s energy spend. To help with this Symantec have storage management products which give deep visibility of use of storage. This can highlight overallocation, help reclaim storage space and defer the purchase of new storage.

Other technologies like dynamic storage tiering can significantly reduce the amount of energy used in storage while data deduplication can free up large amounts of disk space.

Symantec also have software which can put computers to sleep after a set period of inactivity and they have partnered with TechTurn to manage end of life computers

Finally, Symantec see a large role for themselves in helping secure the Smart Grid.

With all these Green credentials, why aren’t Symantec screaming their Sustainability story from the rooftops?

Possibly because they don’t see it as core to their customers’ needs. That is changing. Fast.

Another good reason for Symantec to strt talking up their Green credentials is that companies with a good record on Sustainability have an easier time attracting and retaining employees – something which is vital to the long-term sustainability of any company.

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Tech company sustainability reports reviewed – Updated

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Corporate Social Responsibility
Original photo by ATIS547

I was asked on Twitter recently where to find a list of links to tech companies’ CSR reports.

I didn’t know where to find one, so I built one and as well as just the links, I also added in a few extra observations I noted about the reports.

[table id=4 /]

As previously reported here, the 2009 SAP Sustainability Report is superb.

Another company in the list worthy of note is BT, whose report, despite the lack of interactivity, is the only other report to hit the GRI A+ rating.

HP’s site has gone heavy on design to the detriment of usability which is unfortunate because some of the content is really good.

After that, almost all of the companies who have a 2009 report published have done a really good job. The exception to this is Microsoft whose 2009 report, while an improvement on previous reports, still has a long way to go to approach a professional CSR Report standard.

Of the companies who have yet to publish their 2009 report, Oracle and Adobe’s 2008 reports are lacklustre attempts, at best. Neither report to GRI standards and both are long on pretty pictures and short on relevant data.

Having said that, at least Oracle and Adobe are producing Sustainability reports.

The three laggards in this list are Google, Amazon and Apple – none of whom are producing sustainability reports at the minute.

In their defence, Google has its Going Green at Google website and Apple has its Apple and the Environment site, both of whom go into considerable detail on each companies initiatives. In Apple’s case, it does go deep into a lot of the data you would normally see in a Sustainability report. Why it refuses to produce a formal report is beyond me.

In contrast, Amazon’s attempt at an Environmental site/page is an embarrassment. If this is the best they can do, honestly, they’d be better off doing nothing.

One issue I noted was that HP, Cisco and Apple [PDF] all report on sourcing 100% renewable power in Ireland. This is not possible for the reasons I outlined in this post.

What other companies should I add to this list? Please feel free to suggest any in the comments and I will update the list.

UPDATES:
Since publishing this, Nokia have brought out their excellent 2009 report and it is now included above.
Also, based on suggestions received on FaceBook I have added details about 3 other companies (NEC, Fujitsu and Indra Sistemas). It was also suggested there that I go over various telco companies CSR reports. I’ll leave that to a separate post.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Fufitsu’s 0 Watt PC really does draw 0 Watts when shut down!

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I have been creating a series of little videos on the energy efficiency of various items you might find around the home or office (computers, mobile phone chargers, games consoles, printers, and a microwave oven for example). The video of the computer was particularly revealing because even when the computer was shut down (note completely shut down, not put to sleep, not hibernating) it was still drawing 3W of electricity.

However, Fujitsu sent me a PC to try out. The computer they sent me was one of their Esprimo P Series (model 7935) which is supposed to draw 0 Watts of powere on shutdown. They also sent me one of their P-Line Displays which is also, according to them 0 Watt rated.

I was unconvinced but decided to try it out.

As you can see in the video, the computer consumes a hefty 86W when in operation. This is not that unusual for a desktop but compared to my laptop, which only consumes 32W for example, it is quite high. When it is put to sleep, it consumes 1.7W which is quite good for a desktop in sleep mode. However, when I shut it down, the power draw from both the computert and monitor went completely to 0W. If you check out the mobile phone charger videos I posted, you can see that the sensitivity of the power meter I used was 0.1W

I have to admit to being really impressed by this. Still, just how likely is this to fly commercially?

The other computer I tested drew 3W when shut down. It is easy to say 3W but what direct impact does that have on people or businesses?

Well, the ESB in Ireland charge €0.16 (incl. VAT) per unit of electricity (where 1 unit = 1kWh = 1,000W for 1 hour)
So 3W for 1 hour = 3Wh
3W for 1 week = 168 hours x 3W = 504Wh
3W for 1 year = 504Wh x 52 = 26208Wh or 26.208kWh
26.208 units x €0.16 = €4.19 per annum

So if my maths are correct, a 3W trickle of electricity costs around €4.20 a year.

I don’t have any pricing information on the 0 Watt PC but I don’t imagine €4 per annum will swing a purchasing decision either way, even if it is a purchasing decision for several thousand devices. Where it may make a difference is if companies are interested in reducing their carbon emissions.

In the short term, this is a nifty way of reducing energy draw when computers are not in use. Longer term this problem will be resolved by offerings like Cisco’s Energywise whereby sockets can be powered off remotely, on a schedule or when an office is vacated, obviating the need for 0 Watt PCs.

On a larger scale the real problems with regard to energy production and heightened greenhouse gas emissions occur during the working day when computers are typically turned on. Reduce the amount of electricity a computer requires to run, as well as the amount of power it draws when shut down for the real win.

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What is your company’s Sustainability Communications Program like?

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Sustainability

Photo credit _ A l v a r o _

I guess the first question should be does your company have a Sustainability Communications Program? If not, why not?

As I mentioned in my last post, it is now time for everyone to

band together not only at national levels, but at company and community levels to do everything we can to work to reduce our impact on the planet. Don’t rely on your politicians to do it for you. Get together with friends, neighbours, co-workers and make a change.

So, what is your company doing about sustainability? Some companies invest heavily in this space. Others roll it under the marketing umbrella and still more, don’t even have a sustainability policy.

How do you improve your company’s sustainability policies? I don’t know! But more than likely, you or others in your organisation have great ideas about ways your company can be more environmentally responsible. Why not poll them?

Roll out a bottom-up Sustainability Suggestions Wiki in your organisation today. Most people have excellent ideas on how to improve things in their company but assume they will not be listened to. A wiki allows people to make suggestions in a transparent, meritocratic manner.

Incent people to do so. Give prizes for best suggestions every month. Prizes could be anything from something small like a CFL light bulb, or a Current Cost meter, all the way up to sponsorship of an MBA in Sustainable Business, or any number of things in between.

Go further, video and podcast interviews with winners – make them heroes in the company. The rewards for the company will often be cost savings through efficiencies but also a more highly motivated workforce, who see the company as being responsible and caring of what they (the employees) think.

Enabling bottom-up suggestions in this manner (and subsequently acting on them) promotes a “We are all in this together” spirit and empowers people to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, a difference which they may be unable to make as individuals.

Why wouldn’t you do this?

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The temperature imperative!

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Global Temperature Rise

Graph courtesy of the UK’s Climate Research Unit

The graph above, taken from the UK’s Climate Research Unit, is very sobering. I first noticed the graph when Joseph Romm did an excellent analysis of it on his Climate Progress site.

A few points to note from Joe’s piece:

  • * the 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s
  • * since the 1990s were only 0.14°C warmer than the 1980s => global warming is accelerating
  • * 2008, though cooler than most of the 2000s is on track to be almost 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s as a whole
  • * The 2000s will easily be the hottest decade in recorded history
  • * The “coming decade” (2010-20) is poised to be the warmest on record, globally
  • * The coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade since the authors’ calculations began in 1960
  • * The fast warming would likely begin early in the next decade — similar to the 2007 prediction by the Hadley Center in Science (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot“)

In case anyone had any doubts that global warming is occurring, this should set those doubts to rest.

Governments are acting too slowly on this. It is up to individuals and companies to take actions to reduce our impact on the planet.

The companies we cover on this blog: IBM, Microsoft, HP, Siemens, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Dell, SAP, Oracle, Nortel, Cisco, etc. are all making significant efforts to reduce their impacts on the planet (or we wouldn’t be covering them!).

However, as the graph above indicates, our way of life is under threat. Now, as George Monbiot says,

We need to resurrect the old-fashioned virtues of uniting in the face of a crisis, of resourcefulness and community action

We all need to band together not only at national levels, but at company and community levels to do everything we can to work to reduce our impact on the planet. Don’t rely on your politicians to do it for you. Get together with friends, neighbours, co-workers and make a change. Today.