Archive for the 'IBM' Category

Guest Post: On Water and The Climate Ahead

Published
by
monkchips
on April 24, 2008
in IBM and SMB
. 0 Comments

One of Greenmonk’s core beliefs is that the private sector is making all the running when it comes to long term sustainability thinking, so I was very interested to hear about a conference last week in which water utilities were meeting other stakeholders to discuss climate change related issues. Cortland Coleman was there and very kindly offered to write up the event. If you’re on twitter he is definitely worth following if you’re interested in sustainability.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishmaelo/224261862/

“A symposium was held last week at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S., exploring how global climate change will impact the world’s precious water resources. “The Climate Ahead” was attended by state and federal government officials, researchers, regulators, students and environmental advocates. The annual symposium draws a growing audience of people working on water management issues, climate change and related environmental issues. Over 200 people attended this year’s symposium. There is no doubt that water resources and infrastructure will be stressed by the impacts of climate change. Demand for water is increasing while the supply of safe, healthy water is declining. Global climate change threatens to increase the gap between water supply and demand due to potential changes in weather patterns, seasonal shifts and watershed production. This growing gap could lead to large populations being more vulnerable to water shortages, as unequal access to safe water grows. These same populations are at a greater risk to be victims of flood, drought or other environmental disaster brought on or made worse by the impacts of global climate change. Managing depleting water resources will be a critical skill as we deal with the effects of climate change. Utilities are weighing the anticipated costs of climate change on their drinking water systems. Unfortunately, computer models cannot accurately factor in all variables and therefore, come up short when attempting to clarify and define risk mitigation, cost of not taking action, etc. What is clear is that water usage, conservation, filtration and distribution must all be closely and carefully examined as we work to finds new ways to meet the growing demands for water across the globe. Presentations from the seminar are now available for download from: http://climatechange.rutgers.edu/2008_symposium_presentations.php”

photo courtesy of ishrona under CreativeCommons Attribution 2.0 license.

Greenmonk partners with Akvo, the Open Source for Water.

Thoughts on Green SOA: a work in progress

Published
by
monkchips
on April 9, 2008
in IBM, IT, footprint and global warming
. 4 Comments

Yesterday at IBM’s SOA Impact 2008 show in Las Vegas (my favorite eco-city) I gave my Green SOA stump pitch. Its still a work in progress, and fortunately perhaps the number of delegates was pretty low. SOA for Dummies across the hall on the other hand was packed.

What is service oriented architecture, and why is Greenmonk so dorky today? Good questions both. SOA is an approach to software development that should enable far greater flexibility than normal.  Business and technical interfaces are standardised, and stored in libraries so that services can be reused, or changed as required by the business.

Why is Greenmonk so dorky? Well, you can’t fight your nature, now can you?

My argument at the event is basically that if SOA is a means to better alignment between IT and the business, then we should also drive sustainability into the mix. Componentising services gives you freedom to leave, for example, potentially allowing you to swap a provider out for a greener, or more importantly from a bottom line perspective, more energy efficient service.

The new frontier in compliance is environmental regulations and mandates. South Korea, as I found out yesterday, already has a carbon added tax. I have written about REACH , the EU chemical reporting standard before. One quote I used, which I find pretty striking given it comes from a US oilman (not exactly a community full of bleeding heart liberals):

“The U.S. needs a strong, consistent and mandatory national framework to manage carbon emissions. One that is unencumbered by diverging state and regional initiatives. Without this framework, rising public concern over climate change threatens our energy security by contributing to further access restrictions.”

Jim Mulva, Chairman & CEO, ConocoPhillips

Environmental compliance is going to cost companies hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars over the next few years. My partner in crime at the event is a guy called Jim Bitonti, who presented about his company Evergreen Energy, its C-Lock application and partnership with IBM called GreenCert. The application, a sophisticated distributed app for greenhouse gas measurement, monitoring and management is built end to end on IBM middleware, so it was not surprising IBM asked me to collaborate with him. But regardless of platform Jim knows his stuff, and is solidly pragmatic about the opportunities and limitations of environmental compliance. I would like to see a collaboration with AMEE, and will hopefully broker a meeting between Gavin and C-Lock next week.

I realise now that I need to make the pitch more technical for n audience of SOA folks. But all in all it was a good learning experience, and I am certainly glad IBM realizes the importance of Green SOA, even if its customers are yet to catch on.