Search Results for: ibm

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IBM based mobile, crowdsourced-reporting application helps schools speed up repairs

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Leaking tap

Attending IBM’s Pulse 2012 event this year I was again struck by how much IBM’s Maximo is used in maintenance management applications.

And why do we care about that you ask?

Well, keeping machinery properly maintained, and alerting if machines go out of tolerance for certain parameters (energy consumption spikes in refrigeration plant, fuel or oil consumption in engines, even the presence (or absence) or certain chemicals, etc.) is often an early sign that that machine/system is faulty. Sometimes this fault can result in extra consumption of a resource, other times it can be a safety issue. In any case the measurement and alerting can kick off a pro-active maintenance ticket which may otherwise have been missed.

Correct scheduling of servicing for a lot of machinery is a sustainability win too. If machines are not serviced according to the manufacturers schedule, consumption tends to increase, but properly maintained they are safer, and typically consume less.

I came across an interesting example of this recently with IBM’s announcement of a project to make the US’s 2nd largest school district one of its greenest and most sustainable.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has 700,000 students, 14,000 buildings spread over 710 square miles in California. It receives more than 300,000 maintenance service requests per year.

How are IBM going to improve it?

They are making it more efficient by allowing 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. One receipt of the text, GIS is used to locate the problem which is then submitted directly to the Maintenance & Operations Service Call Desk (which runs on IBM’s Maximo Asset Management software).

?Each year we found we were spending too much time, money, and energy locating, and reporting a problem before we even had the chance to fix it,? says Danny Lu, business analyst, Los Angeles Unified School District. ?By finding a more efficient way to report and locate needed repairs, we are able to respond faster to serve our campuses. The best part is that the solution is at the fingertips of most everyone on campus.?

Text messages are great, but obviously this needs to be expanded way beyond just sms (use of which is declining globally). This kind of project needs to have an app for each of the major phone/tablet OS’s, it needs to be able to listen in on social media channels, as well as being able to receive texts. Only when all communication sources are catered for, will an initiative like this have a chance to make this school district the US’s greenest and most sustainable.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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IBM launch Intelligent Water for Smarter Cities

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Water

Intelligent water is the latest addition to the IBM Smarter Cities portfolio.

in the world’s cities are growing at an astounding rate. For the 1st time in history, over 50% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Over 1 million people are moving into cities every week, and it is estimated that by 2050 70% of people on the planet will live in cities.

This unprecedented growth in urban populations makes the provision of basic services like transport, security, water etc. increasingly complex. This is irrespective of whether the city is a mature city or a developing one. It was against this backdrop that IBM launched its Smarter Cities product.

At the core of this offering is its Intelligent Operation Center (IOC) which takes inputs from systems throughout the city and depending on the input, raises alerts, kicks off workflows, or displays the information on any of a number of dashboards which can be configured to display differing information based on a user’s login.

The newly announced Intelligent Water offering is yet another module capable of working with the IOC. In their briefing call, IBM were at pains to point out that their experience working with custom projects like the ones in Galway Bay, the Washington DC, and the Dubuque, Iowa all helped shape this new product.

Water issues are global in their reach, even if the difficulties differ from region to region (i.e. drought in Texas, flooding in Thailand, water quality in India).

IBM’s Intelligent Water helps organise water-related work. It drives proactive maintenance and schedules the maintenance so that the majority of the time is spent actually doing the maintenance, as opposed to driving between destinations. It allows water managers to see where the water is going – is it being delivered to customers, or disappearing through leaks in the pipework? Are customers using it effectively or not?

It integrates with geospatial packages and has map-based views, there are analytics for optimized scheduling, work order reporting, water usage reporting and display dashboards with roles-based information display. It is possible therefore to create views for the public (to display on the municipality’s website, for example), views for the Mayor’s office and others screens for the water planners and water operators.

According to IBM, Intelligent Water is available today. It comes with IBM’s business intelligence reporting tools as part of the solution and is available in standalone, cloud or hybrid versions.

I’m open to correction, but I’m not aware of any other company offering a comprehensive city management software solution like this. With cities growing at the rates they are, and most resources being finite, management solutions like this are going to be in greater and greater demand.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Top 14 IBM achievements in the last 100 years

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IBM turned 100 earlier this month – a significant achievement for any company, but for one in the constantly shifting sands that is the technology industry, it is particularly notable.

As part of the celebrations, they released the video above outlining 100 of their achievements during that time. The video is beautifully executed and it is a great IBM marketing tool. It is easy to see that the video has a strong sales message towards the end (which tbh, is a tad unnecessary) but the earlier content is definitely worthy of comment.

Some of the highlights for me were:

  1. In 1914, 76 years before the US Disabilities Act, IBM hired its first disabled employee
  2. In 1930 IBM receives its first patent for a traffic signal timing system
  3. In 1932 IBM started education programs for employees and customers
  4. In 1934 IBM introduces group life insurance (in the midst of the Great Depression)
  5. In 1935 IBM opens the first professional training school for women
  6. In 1941, IBM hired a legally blind employee, psychologist Dr. Michael Supa, to make its products more usable by the visually impaired and to assist in the hiring of 181 people with disabilities over the following two years
  7. In 1942 IBM launches a disabled employee training program
  8. In 1943 Ruth Leach Amonette is elected IBM’s first female Vice President
  9. In 1946 IBM hires T.J. Laster, their first black sales representative, 18 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964
  10. In 1953 IBM chairman Thomas Watson issues the company’s first Equal Opportunity Policy letter
  11. In 1967 IBM employee Benoit Mandelbrot ask’s How long is the Coast of Britain and a new branch of mathematics (fractal geometry) is born
  12. In 1981 IBM introduces the first IBM PC
  13. In 2004 IBM creates the World Community Grid – a public grid computing project to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity
  14. And in 2008-9 IBM creates the Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities programs.

Other highlights include inventions of the ATM, the barcode, and DRAM; the fact that at least 3 IBM’ers have won Nobel Prizes; and IBM’s Deep Blue beating world champion chess player Gary Kasparov.

It is easy to criticise this video by saying it is nothing but a sales pitch – but the strong sales message is only really in the final two minutes of the video (from 11:14-13:15) – if you stop the video at that point, you miss nothing and get see for yourself the list of their achievements.

These are just my favourites, what are yours?

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IBM’s Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities announcements

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Smart buildings are a topic I’m interested in and so I devote significant coverage to them on this blog. One of the reasons for that is that, for example, in the US alone, buildings are responsible for about 70% of the energy consumption and for about 40% of the greenhouse gases emitted and by 2025, buildings worldwide will become the largest consumer of global energy — more than transportation and the industrial sectors combined. Smarter buildings can help owners and operators cut energy use by as much as 40 percent and cut maintenance costs by 10 to 30 percent, according to IBM.

So why am I writing about Smarter Buildings again now?

Well, last week IBM launched its Intelligent Building Management software and refers to it as IBM’s “first advanced analytics software solution for Smarter Buildings”. To showcase its potential, IBM referenced three projects using the software:

  • Tulane University (as seen in the video above)
  • the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where IBM are helping the staff better control the environment to help with the preservation of the exhibits and
  • IBM’s Rochester Minnesota campus where the rollout of the software saw an already energy-efficient campus further reduce its energy consumption by 8%, according to IBM

Now while making software to make buildings more energy-efficient is pretty cool, IBM have seriously taken it up a notch by unveiling a software solution to make cities smarter. Called the Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities this software is designed to help city officials to pull together data from divergent sources to help in the smoother running of cities.

IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smart Cities dashboard

IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smart Cities

This is not new software, per se. What IBM have done is taken existing relevant software from its own portfolio, combined the bits (no pun) together and laid down an analytics layer on top. This re-use of code is in itself, a nice example of Green coding!

Over the next 12 months IBM intends to offer specific Operations Center modules for public safety, water, and transportation with tools to make it easier to connect IBM?s analytical engines with existing embedded systems:

However, I suspect that the biggest issue selling city-wide software solutions will be in identifying the buyer (and/or the data owner!). A lot of the information IBM is trying to incorporate into the Intelligent Operations Center will need to come from various data silos and political fiefdoms within city government.

Having said that, if anyone can make this market, it’s probably IBM.

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IBM Partner companies discuss Smarter Buildings and collaboration

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I had a chat with some of IBM’s partners – Eaton‘s Dave Davidson and Tridium‘s Marc Petock, at IBM Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings, and Smarter Cities today and the requirement for collaboration to achieve their possibilities. Unfortunately I messed up the setup of the camera cutting off my head from most of the chat – but on the other hand, that’s probably a good thing!

And here’s the transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at IBM’s Pulse 2011 Conference and with me I have two IBM partners; Marc Petock from Tridium and Dave Davidson from Eaton Corporation.

Now, guys, we have been talking a lot at this event about smarter buildings. Why are you guys involved in smarter buildings? Another kind of theme that has come up at the event has been around collaboration. Why is that important? Dave, I will ask you first.

Dave Davidson: Absolutely! Thanks for inviting me. Smarter building design, deployment, development, and implementation, requires a collaborative effort among many of the different disciplines to actually make a building perform as necessary. So you have the design engineering. You have the controls equipment. You have the monitoring equipment. You have the commissioning of the building and specification equipment and just implementing the whole facility. That needs to be a collaborative effort among many different companies to make this occur.

It’s too big of an effort for any one company to do it all alone. So that’s why we have a collaborative effort.

Tom Raftery: What part of that are Eaton involved in?

Dave Davidson: Eaton’s collaborative effort is around the energy engineering and design and development of the high performance green building and also providing the equipment to power the building.

Tom Raftery: And Marc, Tridium, what are Tridium involved in?

Marc Petock: Tridium is involved in making the technology that links all the different systems and the disparate pieces of equipment in a building to connect and talk to one another. So that they can collaborate with each other and all the different systems within that building, from HVAC, to lighting, to digital signage, to irrigation, to truly make all the systems run as one functional family.

Tom Raftery: So somebody managing the facility can see information from all these systems in one pane?

Marc Petock: In one pane, absolutely, anytime, anywhere, from a PDA, to a centralized command and control center, to individual sites whenever they want to. So they can actually go in and look at the HVAC system and see how the security system is affecting the HVAC system based on occupancy for example.

Tom Raftery: Okay. How far are we from being able to control devices using these kind of panes from reacting to alerts from a screen?

Marc Petock: We are not far at all. You can do it today. We are here today to be able to do that. With cooperation amongst — as my colleague Dave said here, it is a collaborative effort. People like Eaton, Tridium, Johnson, Honeywell, IBM, we are all making sure that this happens and that technology and those systems exist today.

Tom Raftery: And Dave, I mean, how big is this? What kind of market are we talking about? Is this like one or two buildings that might need it, or is it multiple orders of magnitude of that, or what kind of scale are we talking about for this?

Dave Davidson: I think when you ask about how big it is, I think what we have to consider is, it is the built environment. So existing buildings today can absolutely be improved if you have a plan of attack. So you have to create the energy plan.

So I would say that almost all of the built environment has the opportunity to become a smarter building, reduce energy consumption, reduce greenhouse gases, increase operating profit, and increase the comfortability of actually working in that building. So the size of the marketplace is all existing buildings.

Tom Raftery: That’s a big market.

Dave Davidson: Very big.

Tom Raftery: Okay, gentlemen, thanks a million for coming on the show!

Marc & Dave: Thank you for having us!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

You should follow me on Twitter here

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IBM’s Dave Bartlett on his vision for Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities

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I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities. I posted the first part of it yesterday – in today’s post, we discuss the future for Smarter Buildings and cities

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at IBM’s Pulse 2011 Conference. And with me I have IBM’s Dave Bartlett.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We talked earlier about the state-of-the-now with smart buildings and that kind of stuff, but where is all this going? Sure, right now we can see the energy information coming from buildings. What are we going to be doing with this kind of stuff in five, ten years time? Where is it all going?

Dave Bartlett: Well, that’s where it gets really exciting. I mean, we have talked about how there is opportunity today to save significant energy, but if you think about the bigger play, the smarter planet play, the smarter city play, buildings is a key building block for those plays.

I mean, every building has meters. So you can take advantage of the Smart Grid Initiatives as they become realized, not only to take advantage of different time of day based pricing, but also help the city cope with or prevent brownout conditions and make sure energy is available to the core infrastructure.

Tom Raftery: So you would have buildings participating in demand response programs automatically and shifting load and that kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: Exactly! I mean, if you are running a city, the key thing, you want to keep the traffic system up, you want to keep the hospitals up. Maybe you don’t care about running the pool pumps in the hotel pools as an impending brownout occurs, so that you can start to make tradeoffs like that.

So it turns out smarter buildings is a great building block to create the smarter city and do that with —

Another example is emergency response. Let’s say there is a building that’s on fire. If it’s connected to a smarter transportation system, the transportation can be rerouted away from that block so that the engines actually can get to the building and not be prevented from traffic from getting there as soon as they could be.

You could also automatically power off the buildings. You could possibly decrease water pressures in the surrounding areas to maximize water pressure in that area.

So it’s a combination of the smarter water system, the smarter transportation system, the smart grid system, working with a smart building system, to really increase the efficiency of your emergency response team in the city.

Tom Raftery: Okay. You mentioned another example earlier which fascinated me. It was around just taking in weather information.

Dave Bartlett: Right. So a lot of times we operate our buildings without any thought to what the weather is doing, but if a cold front is coming within the next hour or two hours, you could make decisions as to whether or not to turn the air conditioning on or turn it off in anticipation of that.

We are also implementing a lot more free air cooling, kind of getting back to the days when we used to open windows right? A big new idea [laughs]. So unbolt some of those windows.

So being able to forecast the weather, being aware of what’s happening in terms of humidity and temperature and turn off the air conditioning and start leveraging free air cooling, not just for office environments, but for manufacturing uses, for the big chilling towers, a huge opportunity to save energy.

You don’t want to be toggling these systems back and forth. If you are really tied in a close way to weather forecasting, even on an hourly basis, you can make really good decisions when to toggle between free air and the system. So just a much smarter way to run our buildings, our manufacturing plants, our offices.

Tom Raftery: So it seems like right now the state of the now in smarter buildings that we are looking inside and the state of the future is the buildings themselves will be looking outside.

Dave Bartlett: Looking outside, because the buildings will then become — each of them will become a participant in creating or building a smarter building.

I like to say, how do you get a smarter city, one smarter building at a time. So they can become the building blocks; building blocks for — actually smarter buildings can become new eco-cubes within the city. The eco-cubes can then populate to make the subsections of a city, and then the city as a whole. So it’s a little bit easier way to approach it.

Buildings are a natural connection point for the electric grid, for water, as transportation hubs, security, and video feeds. So it’s just a natural building block. So I see, we can get going today and then have all those connection points in place and all of a sudden realize a smarter city very quickly.

Tom Raftery: Awesome! Dave, thanks a million! Thanks for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

You should follow me on Twitter here

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IBM’s Dave Bartlett talking today’s Smarter Buildings

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I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities.

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. I am here with Dave Bartlett. We are at IBM’s Pulse 2011 event.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We are talking about smarter buildings at the event quite a lot. It seems to be one of the focuses that IBM is looking at very strongly.

Is it all science fiction or is this kind of stuff that we can do today, or are we talking a year or two years? What’s the kind of time scale that we are looking at for this kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: No, it’s today, a very present possibility. When we stepped back and looked at what’s happened in the last decade, there has just been a rapid acceleration and proliferation of smart sensors. Every appliance going into buildings now has smart technology into it. So they are all emitting all these digital feeds. So that’s where the Building Whisperer comes in. There is all this data. If someone just really listens to it end-to-end, it’s amazing the opportunity we have today just to integrate into those systems and save energy.

Tom Raftery: Sure. But these buildings are emitting data, but I mean, how long is it going to take to actually get something out there that will be able to integrate all these feeds and present it to somebody?

Dave Bartlett: Okay. So when you look at it, they are emitting a lot of data from different equipment types. So there is different protocols to deal with, different networks to deal with. It’s a lot of data. That’s a second thing.

Third, it really does need an IT focus in addition to the building management skills, and that’s what IBM does so well. I was able to find technology that exists today off the shelf in IBM to really do the monitoring connection to the equipment, to do the data warehousing, to do the analytics, to build the dashboard, that technology all exists today. So it’s just a matter of connecting it and connecting it turns out is not a big deal.

Tom Raftery: So we can do it today. You are going to market with products for building managers to run buildings and global facilities?

Dave Bartlett: Absolutely! In fact, when I presented it to our Chairman, he said, well, this is great, take it market, but I want to start within IBM, which I thought was some great leadership.

So just within the past year we have implemented it, not only in our headquarters building, but in one of our biggest energy using sites, and it has already exceeded the base case in terms of savings and given 200% return on the investment.

Tom Raftery: Wow! I mean, what’s the kind of global marketplace for this kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: I mean, there are lots of different estimates, but there has been a study done by a Climate Group called SMART 2020 that said, if we do exactly what we are doing, apply existing communication and IT technology to the space, that we could save hundreds of billions of dollars in energy between now and the year 2020.

Tom Raftery: Okay. Dave, that’s great! Thanks a million for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

You should follow me on Twitter here

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I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home

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HP's Energy and Sustainability Management

Above is a screenshot of one of the slides from HP’s webinar announcing their new Energy and Sustainability Management solution.

What is most interesting about it for me is that, front and center there is a focus on Facilities and Buildings. We have already seen that IBM has identified Smarter Buildings as one of the major planks of its Smarter Planet program, now with HP chasing this sector as well, we are likely to see some major improvements in global building stock’s energy efficiency in the coming years.

It is nice to see HP re-discovering its interest in sustainability especially, since former CEO Mark Hurd eviscerated any programs related to sustainability in HP during his tenure. As my colleague James noted, the real legacy L?o Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, left SAP (where he was formerly CEO) is SAP’s deep commitment to sustainability. It looks like he is bringing his sustainability stamp to HP as well, but I digress.

As I noted in the post about IBM:

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions ? and then there is the market size to consider ? every building on the planet potentially.

Though there is one qualification to that – I suspect in the cases of both HP and IBM, when they refer to Smarter Buildings, they are primarily referring to commercial real estate, not residential buildings. This is understandable, given that the commercial market is a far easier one to address – a single contract can be for hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate, whereas the residential sector, by definition, is far more fragmented. However, according to the IPCC, the residential sector is responsible for 1,500MtC of carbon emissions compared to 1,000MtC for commercial buildings.

How do we square this circle?

Well, one player addressing precisely this market is Living PlanIT. In their model city in Portugal, they are creating residential buildings which are net energy positive! They are also creating a platform for the development of sustainable urban technologies and licensing them so they can be used globally. I spoke recently to Living PlanIT’s CEO recently about their plans and will be writing that up in a separate post.

However, the takeaway is that, while the commercial market is a hugely important one to address, it really is the low hanging fruit in terms of the global built environment’s energy footprint. We need to be actively chasing the residential space, at least as vigorously as the commercial one.

I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home. When we all have one of those, then we’ll have made some real progress.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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IBM Pulse and Smarter Buildings/Smarter Cities

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Mike Rhodin, IBM SVP, talking Smarter Cities at IBM Pulse

I attended IBM’s Pulse conference last week and the big surprise for me was the amount of attention being paid to Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities. With 600+ sessions over six parallel tracks it is only to be expected that there be some Smarter Building content but at this event Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities were mentioned in most of the keynotes. The Smarter Buildings market has obviously been identified by IBM as one to chase.

IBM also timed two related press releases to coincide with the event – in the first IBM talk about how they worked with McMaster University to improve the energy supply and use in its 60 campus-wide buildings and a university hospital. In the second announcement IBM released the names of several cities it is working with on Smarter Cities initiatives (Washington D.C., Wilmington, N.C. and Waterloo, Ontario).

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions – and then there is the market size to consider – every building on the planet potentially.

Buildings are complex animals and they are not exactly dumb today – so how do we go about making them smarter? Most buildings have many disparate data sources (lights, heating, aircon, running equipment, doors, lifts, etc.). Where the likes of IBM can help is in pulling all this information together into a single window, and allowing building managers to view the information in context. IBM then layers its analytics on top of the information to show trends in energy use, highlight problems, as well as helping forecast and optimise energy consumption.

Similarly, but on an even bigger scale, IBM is helping cities manage their systems. Everything from traffic congestion and lighting optimisation, right the way through to water use optimisation and first responder call outs can be managed electronically right now. Again these systems have lots of disparate data – but it is in consolidating this data that IBM excels. Right now they are working with cities on individual projects around things like water use and traffic but look out for announcements soon from IBM on a product for the management of entire cities. That’ll be one to get really excited about!

You should follow me on Twitter here

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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IBM launches city simulation game, CityOne.

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IBM recently launched a game called CityOne.

I saw this game demo’d when I was at the Smarter Industries Symposium in Barcelona and I promised myself I’d go back and look at it in more detail.

This morning I sat down with CityOne and took it for a spin.

CityOne registration wall

CityOne registration wall

CityOne is a simulation game where you are the CEO of a city and you have to make decisions on how to react to events that arise, with the help of consultants. The four silos of the city you manage are Energy, Water, the Retail industry and Banking.

Your Mission, according to the website is to

Solve real-world business, environmental and logistical problems. Learn how technology can revolutionize these industries. Explore ways to accelerate process change, integrate with trading partners, and control costs with a flexible IT infrastructure.

The first hurdle you face, if you want to play CityOne, is a daunting Registration Wall. As you can see from the screencap on the right I circled (in red) all the mandatory fields and there’s quiet a few of them. I’d love to know what the bounce rates are for this page because I suspect the vast majority of people, when faced with this kind of screen, don’t bother completing it, and head off to another site.

Then again, perhaps this is the thinking behind the Registration Wall – keep out the riff-raff. Only the most determined will fill out the form and proceed to the game and these are probably who IBM are most interested in talking to.

As you can see from the video above, the game itself is quite slick – throwing up new scenarios at you at every new turn. You are advised by a consultant and given three options to choose from. Depending on your choices, you are awarded points and the happiness index of the population and business, goes up, or down.

A quick hint at this point – if you want to do well in this game – look for the solution which most closely represents an IBM product or service (if you are not sure, look for the magic IBM terms Instrument, Manage, Integrate, Innovate, Optimise and Transform!).

IBM missed an opportunity here, I feel.

They spent a lot of money on this game but it feels too focussed on IBM solutions – had they gone for a less sales-y feel (even the Registration Wall looks like it is designed to be a sales lead generator) then this could have gone viral quite quickly. As it is, I think it will fall into the category of near-miss.