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Technology for Good – episode thirty four with Salesforce’s John Tascheck

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Welcome to episode thirty four of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was SalesForce SVP of Strategy, John Taschek. John and I are both longtime members of the Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time John and I had had a conversation outside of email!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a very successful Kickstarter campaign for a small router which can completely anonymise your internet activity, Lockheed Martin announcing that they’ve made a breakthrough on nuclear fusion technology, and Satya Nadella’s response to his gaffe last week about women seeking a raise.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Energy

Hardware

Internet of Things

Wearables

Mobility

Comms

Privacy

Open Source

Sustainability

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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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Big emphasis on mobility at the SAP for Utilities conference

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SAP for Utilities

I attended the SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio last week. I gave the closing keynote (which I’ll write-up in another post).

I was interested though by the fact that two themes recurred in all the opening keynotes.
1. All of the opening keynoters made mention of Social Media – this was a huge relief because my closing talk was due to be on Social Media, so the speakers were setting the stage nicely! And
2. Mobility was talked up big-time by the speakers

I had expected some talk of mobility, along with HANA, Smart Grids Cloud and Analytics – the usual gamut of topics at these events and they were indeed all addressed, but there was a definite emphasis on mobility over all other topics.

It is understandable – with the advent of tablets and smartphones, computing is going mobile, no question about it. I think it was Cisco’s CTO Paul De Martini who dropped the stat that 200,000 new android devices are being activated daily.

This impacts utility companies on two fronts:
1. On the customer front, utilities can now drop the idea of in-home energy management devices and, instead, assume the vast majority of their customers has access to a smartphone or tablet and
2. On the employee front, utilities have lots of mobile workers – the ability to connect them easily back into corporate applications will be game changing.

In my talk on social media strategies for utilities – I suggested that utilities equip every truck-roll with a smartphone. That way, when they get to site to repair a downed line (or whatever), they can take a quick video of the damage, the people working on-site, and in the voice-over give a rough estimated time of recovery. This can be uploaded to YouTube at the touch of a button on the phone and so, call center operators, and social media departments can direct enquiries to the video – immediately helping diffuse the frustration of having power cut.

Programs like this can even be pro-active and the customer service benefits of rolling this out should not be under-estimated.

Utilities are entering a new, more challenging era. Mobility solutions (especially when combined with social media) will be a powerful tool to help them meet these challenges.

Full disclosure – SAP is a GreenMonk client and paid travel and expenses for me to attend the conference.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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IBM Global Eco-Efficiency Jam Day 2

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IBM Eco Jam Screenshot

Today is the final day of IBM’s Global Eco-efficiency Jam (it finishes at 6pm CET today) and it has been awesome.

There have been hundreds of discussions on all manner of Eco-related topics – everything from LEED certification, to Green software engineering, to Energy Efficiency certificates to Smart cities and collaboration.

People have been asking questions like:

If environmental reporting and efficiency actions becomes the norm, what kinds of incentives and rebates are available to help improve the time to value and return on investments?

Currently this question has had 8 replies.

The question with the most replies (right now) is –

Would you use a mobility car service – like the bicycle rental scheme in Paris but with a small, probably electric vehicle – rather than public transportation or a taxi?

and so far it has had 78 responses!

Often answers to questions directly contradict one another – such as the following answers to the mobility question above:

Yes, I would. But more for fun or visiting a city. Visiting clients on e-bike wearing business dress is difficult

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When Montreal introduced its version of V?lib, called Bixi, most people anticipated tourists would be the prime users. But looking around the city on a nice summer day, most the bikes are used by men and women in business suits, going from one building to the next. For short rides of 2-4 km, you needn’t even break a sweat.

These kind of contradictory answers are inevitable when the participants come from over 100 countries reflecting their country’s culture and infrastructure.

Other discussions were more straightforward

Looking beyond basic power policies on the operating system, do you have any form of PC power management operating on your PC at home or at work?

[UPDATE – this question came from @karolinashaw, Public Relations Manager 1E]

There is plenty of discussion on water as well with people discussing the merits of water metering, water harvesting and town/city water policies.

While I am contributing a bit to the discussions (I have added 39 posts and had 37 replies so far), I am learning a huge amount and coming into contact with participants I might never otherwise have met.

IBM should make this a regular event, no question.

[Disclosure] IBM asked me not to use the names of Jam participants in any blog posts I make here because IBM hadn’t sought their permission so I removed the names from the image above and didn’t credit people quoted above. If I have used your content and you are happy to have me credit you, let me know in the comments or by email ([email protected]) and I’m more than happy to do so.