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Rackspace’s European Cloud really is Green. No Coal Power, All Renewables, Low Carbon Intensity

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At GreenMonk we think its important to get under the skin of sustainability assumptions, to try and understand the underlying data, complex though they may be, which is why we have been skeptical of claims by vendors that cloud is by definition green. We are also disappointed by the Carbon Disclosure Project’s position on the subject. We might as well say cloud is by definition secure, or by definition offers 100% uptime. None of these statements stand up to scrutiny. Cloud can be greener, but a lot depends on where the energy to run that cloud comes from. We need to analyse the inputs, as well as the outputs. If you run your cloud on coal then its not green – its dirty cloud.

My colleague Tom does a great job talking to the issues in this video, with transcript.

Tom also points out that the Google Apps cloud has a surprisingly high carbon intensity. Of course sustainability is about more than energy – which cloud providers have published data on water consumption and use?

I met Rackspacee recently to talk about its European business and I was pleased to discover that its European data center, here in the UK, runs on certified 100% renewable power. If only other cloud providers made such clear and unambiguous commitments to sustainability. Well done Rackspace. Now if we can just get the company to be programmatic about sharing data about its performance, to encourage other cloud providers to become more transparent.

update for extra bonus points from the good people over at Mastadon C, a project to enable organisations to choose where to deploy Hadoop jobs based on the carbon intensity of a chosen data center location. On Mastadon C’s blog today they also commend Rackspace, confirming GreenMonk’s position, also supported by Greenpeace.

“So Rackspace London rocket up the leaderboard as a green option, and we can build moar big data in the UK without doing bad things to the planet! Happy campers all round.”

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What services does GreenMonk offer?

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Tom Raftery speaking at Web 2.0 Expo

A couple of people have been asking me recently what services GreenMonk offers, so I thought it might be a good idea to put some of them down in a blog post so Google knows what they are and so I can link to them when anyone asks in the future.

Advisory Services:

GreenMonk helps client companies with advice on

  • Message testing- helping to bulletproof marketing campaigns, before launch activities.
  • Product strategy and advisory – we can suggest enhancement and product directions based on trends in business sustainability.
  • We will also suggest alliances or partnerships that can enhance your product offerings or increase distribution channels and sales.
  • We will also undertake to ensure executives are aware of significant industry news, trends and events that will impact current and planned business models.

Video Services

Video is a medium which is becoming ever more popular, particularly in the post-pc age. GreenMonk videos are kept brief and to-the-point to maximise impact and reach. Also, to increase find-ability, GreenMonk TV videos are transcribed and the text is published alongside the video.

The GreenMonk TV YouTube channel, with over 150 uploaded videos and in excess of 78,000 views, drives traffic to GreenMonk’s clients. Clients are free to use video purchased in any format/media on any web property, or even offline.

GreenMonk –

  • Helps with content creation for marketing/messaging purposes
  • Showcases executive thought leadership on niche/emerging topics
  • Highlights customer success stories using trusted third party, customer interviews and
  • Documents new products/services

Blog Based Research:

One of GreenMonk’s primary publishing vehicles is the GreenMonk blog. Blog content benefits customers in the following ways:

  • The analysis can be more timely than traditional analyst reports
  • The analysis is freely available to anyone; line of business, IT staff, students, etc. at no cost
  • The analysis is given high ranking by Google, making it easily discoverable
  • The analysis can be further supplemented by comments and contributions from parties external to GreenMonk, thus enhancing its value
  • The two way nature of blogs allows for RedMonk to serve as an early warning system for potential issues with products and services and
  • The blog can also be used to re-publish video and podcasts, recorded separately furthering their reach

Twitter Based Research:

GreenMonk makes extensive use of Twitter as a research tool as well. Twitter benefits our clients in the following ways:

  • Twitter posts are immediate so it is possible to see/track stories rapidly
  • Breadth of accounts we follow means there is unlikely to be a related story or trend we are unaware of
  • Our extensive followership and many years experience of the Twitter platform means we can disperse a message quickly and effectively
  • Twitter can be used as a testing ground for messaging as well as a driver of traffic to web resources
  • The conversational nature of Twitter means that posts are often commented on (replied to) adding to their value and
  • Twitter posts are freely available to anyone; line of business, IT staff, students, etc. at no cost

Consulting Services:

GreenMonk analysts will be available to answer questions concerning competitive positioning, understanding the wider market context and providing dedicated research and information regarding emerging trends and competition.

These analyst-hours can also be applied to custom research projects, advisory and speaking engagements.

Press Availability:

GreenMonk will take the time required to understand your products, announcements, and initiatives. When questioned by members of the media, we will be ready with accurate and up-to- date information on your products, announcements and initiatives.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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Smartphone energy management – at last there is an app for that!

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Carat

The World Bank issued a report yesterday showing that the number of mobile phone subscriptions in use worldwide, both pre-paid and post-paid, has now reached over 6 billion.

The report went on to reveal that more than 30 billion mobile applications, or “apps,” were downloaded in 2011 alone – these apps extend the capabilities of phones, for instance to become mobile wallets, navigational aids or price comparison tools. However the apps also have a cost associated with their use – they drain the phone’s battery.

Carat - smartphone energy managament

Some of these apps are energy hogs – they require a lot of energy to run, and so they drain the phone’s battery quickly (maybe they are legitimately using the camera, the GPS radio, and the 3G network simultaneously). Other apps have bugs in them whereby they may not properly close out battery use after a particular function and they continue to drain the battery. Until now, there has been no way to identify which apps were the ones draining your battery’s charge.

I have written a couple of times here before wondering why there was no energy management app for smart phones. Now there is – Carat.

Carat has been developed by a very small team at the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMP Lab) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki.

The app is free and available for both the iOS and Android platforms. And the client-side code has been uploaded to Github, where anyone can download it, and if they have the development chops, potentially fix any issues they find, or even improve on the app.

As every Smartphone owner knows, battery life is a massive problem. Carat discovered just how big a problem when TechCrunch wrote a piece about the app a few weeks ago. Carat had estimated that they’d pick up an extra 10,000 users as a result of the article. Instead 250,000 people installed the app on their phones and Carat had to scramble to deal with the massive, influx of data.

As can be seen from the image above, Carat gives you advice on ways to get longer life from the battery in your smartphone by identifying Battery Hogs (apps that use a lot of energy), apps with energy bugs and advising on how much extra battery life you will save by re-starting or killing the app.

Carat also reports your J-Score:
Carat J-Score

The J-Score is “the percentile battery life you see relative to all other devices being measured by Carat”, so the J-Score of 54 reported for my phone means my expected battery life is better than 54% of Carat’s users.

One thing to be aware of is that because Carat needs a certain threshold of application usage before it can report accurately on your apps, it typically takes a weeks usage before it starts advising you on how to get better battery life for your device.

Speaking to Carat developer Adam Oliner last week he informed me that some of the next steps for the app will be to publish api’s so that app developers will have better access to the energy consumption info of their applications.

What is interesting about this app is that it was developed as a research project, and not by one of the Smartphone Endpoint Management providers. You’d have thought saving their customers money and reducing their emissions (through using less energy), while keeping their employees more productive (by prolonging the battery life of their smartphones) would have been a no-brainer.

Perhaps, now that it has been shown that this is possible, we’ll see more of these types of apps emerge.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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Logica’s Global Utilities Director, Nigel Spooner talks Smart Meters, Smart Grids and the DCC

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At the recent Logica Utility Analyst day, I talked to Logica’s Global Utilities Director, Nigel Spooner about Smart Meters, Smart Grids and the DCC – here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV, I’m in the Logica building in London with Nigel Spooner. Nigel is Global Utility Director for Logica. Nigel we’ve had a bit of a discussion here during the analyst event that I have just been attending, around smart meters and smart grids. Now we’re in the middle of one of the world’s worst economic crises in a long time, why would utilities want to be spending money on rolling out smart meters?

Nigel Spooner: Yeah it’s a good question isn’t it, it is difficult when money is tight, but there are benefits to smart metering, both in terms of the consumer being able to manage their energy consumption more closely, and also in terms of the distribution companies being able to run their networks more efficiently, but also and importantly being been able to cater for consumers doing their own generation for instance with photovoltaics and also for things like incorporating electric vehicles into the network.

Tom Raftery: So this is kind of life smart grid stuff and can you give us a quick idea, I mean you talked just a little bit about it sidewise, give me kind of an overall picture of what a smart grid is?

Nigel Spooner: A smart grid is difficult to define very succinctly, but it is a distribution grid where there is much more control over the way that power flows both on to and off the grid. At the moment grids are very much one way. The power goes in from the power station, it goes through the network and into the consumer.

Increasingly we’re having to cope for the fact that the consumers themselves are generating power, they are also using things like electric vehicles which have to be charged up at particular times, they need to be controlled if the networks are not to be overloaded, and therefore the distribution grids have to be much more responsive to those loads and those demands going on them. Smart metering gives the distribution companies the opportunity to know what’s going on on that grid to a much closer degree, and in real time than they having been doing so far.

Tom Raftery: And advantages to consumers…

Nigel Spooner: To consumers the advantage is that they can get first of all more flexible tariffs, so we may be able to get tariffs that are much more aligned with the way in which we actually consume energy, rather than being just a blanket tariff that’s the same for everyone. There will be much more information on the energy that one is using, so that for instance one can see when one is going for a rather large load and to turn things off if you need to, but also there is the ability increasingly to respond to variable pricing, so that if we know for instance electricity is going to be expensive in three days time because of demands on the system, then we can react to that and make sure that our large items like air-conditioning units that’s on, do not get turned on when the price is very high. So we should be able to save both energy and money through the information that smart metering gives.

Tom Raftery: And, I’ve heard a bit about this DCC thing that’s been rolled out here in the UK, can you tell me a little bit about that?

Nigel Spooner: Well DCC is simply the organization that is going to be setup or is been setup by the British government to basically take charge of all the data that is coming off smart meters as we roll them out. This will be collected centrally and then distributed to the market participants and the view is that, that will be the most efficient way to manage this huge increase in information that smart meters are providing. By doing that it should make it easier for participants to come into the market and it should make it easier for consumers to get the best deal on their energy.

Tom Raftery: Where is Logica in all this?

Nigel Spooner: Well I’m delighted to say that all the things we’ve been talking about require relatively sophisticated information technology services to enable them to happen. Logica has for many years been in the business of providing the systems and the services that are required to make those infrastructures operate effectively and we will of course continue to do so.

Tom Raftery: Okay, great. Nigel that’s been fantastic, thanks for talking to us today.

Nigel Spooner: Thank You Tom.

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

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Cloud Computing: Google Apps cloud has a relatively high carbon intensity

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Cloud

I have been researching and publishing on Cloud Computing for quite some time here. Specifically, I’ve been highlighting how it is not possible to know if Cloud computing is truly sustainable because none of the significant Cloud providers are publishing sufficient data about their energy consumption, carbon emissions and water use. It is not enough to simply state total power consumed, because different power sources can be more, or less sustainable – a data center run primarily on renewables is far less carbon intensive than one that relies on power from an energy supplier relying on coal burning power stations.

At Greenmonk we believe it’s important to get behind the headline numbers to work out what’s really going on. We feel it’s unacceptable to simply state that Cloud is green and leave it at that, which is why we’ve been somewhat disappointed by recent work in the field by the Carbon Disclosure Project. We would like to see more rigour applied by CDP in its carbon analytics.

Carbon intensity should be a key measure, and we need to start buying power from the right source, not just the cheapest source.

I was pleasantly surprised then yesterday when I heard that Google had published a case study ostensibly proving that Cloud had reduced the carbon footprint of at least one major account.

However, it is never that straightforward, is it?

The Google announcement came in the form of a blog post titled Energy Efficiency in the Cloud, written by Google’s SVP for Technical Infrastructure, Urs Hölzle. I know Urs, I’ve met him a couple of times, he’s a good guy.

Unfortunately, in his posting he heavily references the Carbon Disclosure Project’s flawed report on Cloud Computing, somewhat lessening the impact of his argument.

Urs claims that in a rollout of Google Apps for Government for the US General Services Administration,

the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%.

An 85% reduction in carbon emissions sounds very impressive – but how does Google calculate that figure? Also worth considering is the age of the server estate – any data center that decommissions older servers in favour of new ones is likely to see an efficiency bump. Assuming the GSA servers running Microsoft apps were more than five years old, they would have seen a considerable efficiency bump simply by running the apps on new servers, on premise or off. Without disappearing down a rathole, its also worth noting cradle to cradle factors in server manufacturing – supply chains consume carbon.

We looked at a whitepaper titled Google Apps: Energy Efficiency in the Cloud [PDF], where the search company shares some of the methodology behind the blog post. We would like to see a lot more detail about assumptions and methods.

The key reference to how Google calculated carbon emissions is this line:
The following summary tallies up every GSA server dedicated to email and collaboration across 14 locations in the continental U.S. and applies the appropriate PUEs, electricity prices, and carbon intensities for each location

Here’s the table:
Google Apps GSA case study

The data in the table above is interesting but if you look at the carbon information, you start to notice something strange – here’s a slightly different view on Google’s data:

Google Apps carbon intensity

While it is no real surprise that Google’s servers produce less CO2 per annum than the GSA’s (4.75 vs 7.69 tons), what is very surprising (to me at least) is the fact that Google’s facilities are significantly more carbon intensive than the GSA’s were (14.5 vs 10.63 tons of CO2 per kWh).

In simple terms, carbon intensity is a measure of the amount of CO2 released in the generation of electricity. The data above, clearly show that the data centres hosting the Google Apps Cloud are not optimised for reduced emissions (the best way for data centers to optimise for reduced emissions is to source electricity generated from renewable sources).

I guess the good news is that, while Google has helped the GSA to reduce its carbon emissions, there’s plenty of room for improvement!

I reached out to Urs for a response to this and because he’s traveling at the minute, the only answer I received pointed out that since 2007 Google’s net emissions are zero. And, in fairness to Google, they do fund some worthwhile offsetting projects, as you can see in the video below (check out the farmer towards the end, he’s just awesome!).

Cloud photo credit mnsc

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Logica’s Sustainability Analyst briefing

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Logica's Annual Report cover

Logica held a Sustainability Analysts day in London recently and they invited me to attend.

Pictured above is the cover of Logica’s 2011 Annual Report [PDF] – their Annual Report mind, not their Sustainability Report [PDF]. And yet the title of Logica’s Annual Report is Shaping a Sustainable Future. This is a good indicator of Logica’s proactive stance on Sustainability.

The half-day briefing was a mix of Logica staff talking about the company’s Sustainability products and services, as well as a couple of customers (Carbon Disclosure Project and National Centre for Earth Observation) discussing the value they get from their relationship with Logica. While it was nice having a couple of customers presenting at the event, the fact that neither of these customers are commercial enterprises, per se, could lead one to wonder whether Sustainability is lower on the agenda of traditional enterprise.

Having said that, Logica’s Tony Rooke had a slide with a long list of commercial customers for Logica’s sustainability services. Interestingly these were typically infrastructure companies like utilities, Airwave and Network Rail.

The Logica led sessions were around what Logica is calling Smart Utilities, Sustainable Mobility and also Logica’s Engagement Carbon Calculator.

In the Smart Utilities space, Logica’s Rich Hampshire talked about Logica’s three-pronged strategy (security of supply, affordability, and decarbonising energy). Logica have a Smart as a Service offering here for utilities, and Logica have traditionally been very strong in this sector.

In the burgeoning Sustainable Mobility field, Logica’s Theo Quick talked about a 10,000 point electric car charging network that Logica are rolling out in the Netherlands with eLaad.nl. This was rolled out using the Open Charge Point protocol to allow interoperability between charge points. Logica’s EMO is a vehicle emission monitoring product which, according to Logica, saved a postal company 10% of its fuel in the first three months of use. Theo also mentioned a research project called EPTIMS being rolled out in Manchester – this is a Smartphone app to encourage use of public transport by telling people when they have reached their stop, and one called eCoMove which is an FP7 funded project to reduce the number of trucks traveling around empty (transporting air).

And, Logica’s Stuart Williams mentioned their Engagement Carbon Calculator. This is a Logica offering which is in late beta mode right now. What it does is for any project that Logica carries out, it takes the client’s emissions in a business as usual case, subtracts the actual emissions, as well as the emissions of Logica’s project involvement, to give a savings result for the project.

It was heartening at this event to see Logica’s commitment sustainability, in a time when for most companies sustainability is a fancy word for cutting energy bills.

In the days following this event, Logica announced it had agreed to be purchased by Canadian company CGI. Hopefully with the change of ownership, there won’t come any diminution in Logica’s sustainability focus.

Disclosure – Logica paid for my travel and accommodation to attend this event.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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Green Button and Tendril – developers as kingmakers in the energy space now as well?

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Green button

One of the greatest success stories in the energy sector in the last year is the speed with which America’s Green Button initiative has been adopted.

The project started in September 2011 with a challenge laid down by then US CTO Aneesh Chopra:

today at GridWeek, I challenged the smart grid ecosystem to deliver on the vision of Green Button and provide customers access to their energy usage information electronically. With this information at their fingertips, consumers would be enabled to make more informed decisions about their energy use and, when coupled with opportunities to take action, empowered to actively manage their energy use

His challenge was taken up by the industry with almost unseemly haste.

Green Button data standards were quickly drawn up in conjunction with America’s NIST – this is vital to ensure that Green Button data is cross comparable across utilities – and more importantly, that energy management applications written for Green Button data works across all utilities. This immediately creates a significant userbase for Green Button energy apps.

Then California?s three largest utilities ? Pacific Gas & Electric, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison worked to create a ?Green Button? that allows customers to download their detailed energy usage with one click. Others utilities quickly followed suit and now at time of writing, 25 utility providers are supporting Green Button, including some of the nation’s biggest, like American Electric Power, CentrePoint Energy, and PacifiCorp. This brings the number of households and businesses capable of downloading their energy use information via Green Button in the US to 30 million [PDF] as of May 2012.

Technology companies also joined the efforts, and the list of those involved is long, including most of the usual suspects (Honeywell, Itron, Oracle, Schneider-Electric, Siemens, SilverSpring Networks, and Tendril) with the surprising exceptions of SAP and Logica.

Tendril are a supplier to utilities and they have now made it possible for any of their utility customers to export Green Button formatted files. Nothing too surprising about that, I hear you say. True enough, but where it starts to get really interesting is that Tendril have created GreenButtonConnect.com, a Green Button ecosystem. On this site, consumers can upload their Green Button information to any one of a number of apps hosted there to analyse their energy consumption. Even better though, any developer can use the Tendril Connect platform to develop energy apps, get access to the energy internet and have Tendril help co-market the app!

Tendril have been one of the first to realise that the old RedMonk saw Developers are the new Kingmakers applies just as much to the energy space, as it does to enterprise IT.

To this end, Tendril have also been sponsoring Hackathons themed around energy, like the recent Cleanweb Hackathon in Boulder, Colorado and January’s Cleanweb Hackathon in New York.

In a wide-ranging discussion with Tendril’s VP of Policy, Cameron Brooks, yesterday he opined that while the Green Button files are as yet, not nearly real-time, they will go more and more that direction before long. This will go a long way to facilitating the kinds of value add energy services I posted about recently here.

Photo Credit http://www.samcatchesides.com/

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SAP’s Sustainability announcements at Sapphire Now

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SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe at Sapphire Now 2012

SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe at Sapphire Now 2012

Technology innovation plays a major part in creating a sustainable world tomorrow

So said SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe at this year’s SAP Sapphire Now conference in Orlando. He then went on to predict three major trends in computing for the coming years – according to Jim, in the next five years everything will move to Cloud, everything will be in main memory and everything will be mobile.

This wasn’t just some off-the-cuff remark – these three developments are core to SAP’s product roadmap – even in the Sustainability space.

In the mobile space for example, at Sapphire Now SAP announced a new version of a mobile app for incident management. With this app, workers can now log issues from their mobile device with a photo or video, as well as an audio recording, and send it directly to an incident or safety manager for corrective action. This crowd-sourcing of safety information also has built-in tracking of the reported incident which is hugely empowering for workers who may previously have felt their voice wasn’t heard. And for the companies deploying this solution it leads to a safer work environment and a happier workforce.

This puts me in mind of an initiative IBM rolled out with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) where they enabled students, teachers and staff to report issues like water leaks, broken aircon/heating, exposed cables and so on, by sending text messages and photos through their mobile phones. More please.

Also in the mobile sustainability space, SAP have their Electronic Medical Record app [SilverLight warning] – an app which gives doctors instant access to a patient’s electronic medical records.

In the Cloud space, SAP have made two major recent acquisitions – Successfactors and more recently Ariba at a cost of roughly $7.7bn. This is a clear indicator that while SAP maybe late to the party, it is serious about catching up.

And in the Sustainability space? Well SAP’s carbon management software, Carbon Impact OnDemand is already Cloud delivered. At SapphireNow SAP announced that they are going to rollout an on-demand service for product safety that the company is calling the SAP Product Stewardship and Safety Network. This will be a network where safety professionals can share safety information and best practices.

The irony of sustainability-related software being delivered via the Cloud, a technology which is not Green at all, is not lost on me. It does appear to be lost on SAP however – more on which in a follow-up post.

And finally in-memory computing – what is it? Well, you know how information held in RAM is much faster to access than information on disk, right? So HANA, SAP’s new in-memory database, is where the database is held in RAM for much faster data access. Also, in-memory databases can hold enormous quantities of data, and query them in milliseconds. This is a huge step forward in database technologies and according to SAP it will vastly simplify database maintenance as well because there should no longer be a need for large data warehouses.

Where do the HANA and Sustainability stories intersect? There are several examples – the first is in the area of Smart Grids and Smart meters. The volumes of information utility companies will be expected to handle after installing smart meters are orders of magnitude greater than anything they are used to. Realtime analysis of this firehose of information will allow for much better demand-side management, matching the demand curve to the supply curve, stabilising the grid and allowing for greater penetration of variable generators like wind and solar. Also, this availability of highly granular energy consumption data will facilitate the development of all kinds of new energy products and services that would have previously been impossible to offer. This is sorely needed by utilities who are in the uncomfortable position of currently (no pun) having to try to convince customers to buy less of their product.

Other use interesting cases are discussed in a great post on How Big Data Will Help Achieve Sustainability Goals by SAP’s Scott Bolick. And when you finish checking that out, head on over to Jennifer Lankheim’s post on SAP Situational Awareness for Public Sector where she discusses this new SAP Rapid Deployment Solution to help public safety and security organizations better anticipate, assess, and act on emergency situations.

We are only scratching the surface of what the implications of Big Data, Cloud, Mobility and in-memory computing are for sustainability. Expect to see far more announcements in this space in the near future.

Disclosure – SAP is a GreenMonk client and SAP paid my travel and expenses to attend Sapphire Now.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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Utilities need to offer innovative energy services or risk being sidelined

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Elderly man

The EU has mandated a rollout of smart meters to at least 80% of households by 2020. What are some of the transformative ways we will we use the extra energy consumption information these meters will bring?

Last November I wrote a blog post about new energy services and business models for utilities which the granular energy consumption smart meters measure will enable. In the post I noted that

according to the US Census Bureau:

The world’s 65-and-older population is projected to triple by midcentury, from 516 million in 2009 to 1.53 billion in 2050.

Further, there are currently 30 million solo-single households in the United States (more than the number of households containing married couples with children) and about one-third of these solo singles are men and women 65 years of age and older. The percentage is even higher in Europe.

Now, if I have an elderly relative living alone, wouldn’t it be a very useful service if I could receive a timely message from their utility company if there are deviations from the normal patterns of energy usage (if the lights aren’t turned off at 11pm or the coffee machine/kettle isn’t powered up at 8am)?

I have been positing this idea of using exceptions to normal energy use as triggers for alerts, especially for family members interested in the care of an elderly relative for quite some time. Every time I mentioned it though, I always received technical reasons why it wasn’t feasible. Until very recently that is.

A few weeks back I attended the SAP for Utilities event in Madrid. There I had a meeting with Axel Memminger where we were talking about SAP’s in-memory database HANA. Because HANA runs in-memory, it allows for very fast querying of massive datasets. This is fantastic for seeing trends in historic data but not for examining realtime info.

During our talk, Axel happened to mention that as part of the Sybase acquisition SAP now had picked up a realtime event processing engine called Event Insight. Event Insight was built to parse massive amounts of data looking for exceptions and triggering alerts in realtime.

It immediately occurred to me that this was the missing piece needed to allow utilities rollout enhanced energy services like the monitoring of elderly relatives I outlined above. When I explained this idea to Axel his eyes lit up and he started architecting the solution in his head as we discussed it.

“Would you be willing to pay for something like this?” he asked me at one point. “If this were offered for something like €5 a month, I’d pay it in a heartbeat” I replied. And I strongly suspect I’m far from unique in this.

With utility companies facing reduced incomes from energy sales, it is only by providing imaginative energy services like this that utilities will secure their long-term viability.

Nor will they be alone in plying for this business. I can see services like this being offered by telcos as well and even more likely, it is a natural extension of services from care companies who typically already offer remote monitoring.

Unless utilities are innovative in the energy services they develop and offer, they may find themselves sidelined in their core-market. Who’d have predicted 10 years ago that Apple Computers would be the dominant player in music sales?

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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GreenMonk Sustainability Customer Reference series – Kimberly-Clark

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This is the second video in my Sustainability Customer Reference series project – it involves my going to SAP customers and interviewing them about the sustainability solutions they have implemented. The first SAP customer I visited was AkzoNobel in Sweden. In this second video, I talk to Kimberly-Clark’s Barry Podd.

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to the GreenMonk Sustainability Customer Reference Series, sponsored by SAP. With me I have Barry Podd from Kimberly-Clark. Barry can you tell me a little bit about your role in Kimberly-Clark and also a little bit about Kimberly-Clark itself?

Barry Podd: My role within Kimberly-Clark includes looking after chemicals legislation globally for the company. And this has become more important for Kimberly-Clark over the last few years by the way the chemical legislation has been written, including companies who use chemicals, rather than manufacture them.

To talk about Kimberly-Clark, it’s a very large company, of course. We have a professional business, and we also have a consumer business. And it is probably the consumer business that is best known.

Products that we make are facial tissues. Kleenex is the big brand name in that area. Also our diapers, Huggies is the big brand name in that area. And we also make things like toilet tissue and Andrex and Scottex are probably the names that people know best in that area.

Tom Raftery: What impact has the changing legislation had on Kimberly-Clark?

Barry Podd: We have to do things like tracking the amount of chemicals we import as a global manufacturer from outside the European Union. Also, as far as our articles go, we’re very fortunate, we don’t tend to use hazardous chemicals in our products because of the nature of them, but that doesn’t help us under the legislation. We still have to track and know that we do not have those hazardous chemicals in our products.

Tom Raftery: And you’ve recently rolled out the SAP Product Safety Solution, what benefits do you see that having Kimberly-Clark?

Barry Podd: It will bring benefits in three areas. It will be fully integrated with the SAP software we already have, so a lot of the information we need is already in there and we’ll be able to bring it in and use it to the benefit of ensuring compliance with the legislation.

We still have a lot of data to collect from our raw materials suppliers, and also curiously from our customers on how they use the products we supply them with and SAP will help us in a big way to do that.

And then the third area that it will help us, it will help us store the information that we need to demonstrate that we fully comply with the legislation available to us in Europe. And there, that is one of the really big pluses of the SAP software solution.

Tom Raftery: And finally, what are your plans for the solution, now that you have it installed?

Barry Podd: Well, we’ve got big plans. Not only are we going to use it to ensure compliance with chemicals legislation, and it will be chemicals legislation around the world, but we’re also going to use it to produce our safety data sheets. One thing that we haven’t discussed at the moment is the legislation behind safety data sheets is changing, and they will have to include a great deal more information than hitherto has been the case. And we have decided to bring that now in-house, because that’s the best way for Kimberly-Clark to ensure that we comply with that legislation as well.

Tom Raftery: Barry that’s been great, thanks a million for talking to us today.