Green Technology -Interview: IBM's New "Green" Products to Cut Costs, Carbon Footprint Now

In a sweeping effort to help businesses save money and reduce their environmental impact, IBM this week new products and services to create “greener” offices by controlling energy consumption, reducing use of paper and minimizing the carbon footprints that come with commuting and traveling.

Officials at IBM (News - Alert) say their solutions include programs – such as FileNet Business Process Manager, Lotus Notes 8.5 and new content collection, archiving, e-mail and collaboration software – which collectively hasten paperless offices by eliminating paper trails and reducing content storage and electronic discovery costs.

The new solutions come as companies – including the larger businesses that IBM officials told TMCnet they’re mainly targeting with some of their new products – are seeking to leverage technology to cut costs and boost productivity.

IBM combined the features in two of its Tivoli products to give businesses a tool for monitoring energy costs within their enterprises. A new product, called “IBM Rational Test Lab Manager,” is designed to reduce energy consumption by configuring and managing machines.

TMCnet recently had a chance to put some questions to Chris O’Connor, vice president of IBM Tivoli Software, pictured below. We talked about how current political economic conditions affect businesses’ willingness to embrace green solutions.

Our exchange follows.

TMCnet: As marketed, IBM’s new software and services solutions appear to address energy consumption on two levels – the technologies can save businesses money on rising costs, and also reduce their carbon footprints. As far as these solutions go – updating Lotus Notes and Domino, putting out the archiving software, the paperless lending and energy-tracking solutions – how much of IBM’s initiative is driven by the one concern, and how much by the other?

Chris O’Connor: Some would argue that the carbon and cost concerns are related. IBM’s solutions are, however, broader. We talk about energy and environment, which covers the carbon and energy cost notions, but also helps our clients reduce their environmental impact. Solutions from IBM are available to monitor and control energy consumption – directly tied to carbon – across the infrastructure, reduce environmental and carbon impact of people activities and commuting and travel, optimize end-to-end business operations and processes for efficiency, reduce use of paper, design and build greener products and to streamline regulations compliance activities.

TMCnet: Bryant University is mentioned and quoted as one happy client of IBM software. The university has a 400-plus acre campus with dozens of buildings, and nearly 4,000 combined undergraduate and graduate students. What size are the businesses that IBM is targeting with its solutions? Are some solutions designed to help larger versus smaller companies, and vice versa?

CO: IBM has solutions for the larger and smaller organizations. From an energy perspective, the scale of problems, possible returns and applicable regulations that drive actions are more acute in the larger organizations. Thus our focus is on addressing the needs of the larger organizations.

TMCnet: How is the current economic climate expected to affect the way that businesses embrace these new “green” solutions from IBM?

CO: We see some impacts and some areas that are unchanged. In addition to regulations, stakeholder issues and costs are driving conservation and compliance activities. Customers continue to have strong reasons to continue to invest. Regulations are not going away and the customer sentiment of looking for green suppliers is not going away. However, we see that the nature of investments will become more return-on-investment-driven. As opposed to flashy actions that may not provide the long-term returns, customers are going to focus on steps that provide rapid returns in terms of costs and environmental impact. We see customers buying solutions to monitor and control energy consumption and solutions that help simplify the challenge of regulation compliance.

TMCnet: The combined Tivoli solution is interesting. What value proposition is IBM bringing with this? How is this software different from other power consumption-tracking systems? What sort of decisions will executives make when they have such detailed information in hand about energy use?

CO: The key near term value proposition is visibility. In most cases, IT users don’t have a good grasp of their energy consumption, nor do they understand what devices are most inefficient. Tivoli offerings are bringing together a comprehensive view of the energy consumption across the IT and facilities infrastructure. None of our competitors can bring together an end-to-end view across IT and facilities. Capturing and reporting on this information alone can change behavior in an organization – perhaps a given department had no idea that they were consuming 50 percent of energy in the enterprise. By reporting on energy, organizations can also drive targets for energy reduction and track progress against these goals. The energy consumption data provides customers with the ability to make data driven decisions on steps they should take to reduce their energy consumption. Customers can identify their least energy efficient devices and decide on the right steps to enhance efficiency. These steps could entail consolidation of resources, turning off or throttling devices when not needed, speeding up the replacement cycle in order to more quickly phase out energy hogs, or delaying workloads to time periods when energy costs are lower. Even simple steps such as turning off devices that are plugged in but no longer needed may save up to 10 percent in energy costs.

TMCnet: What is IBM seeing on the political stage, if anything, here in the United States or abroad, that makes now a good time to introduce these solutions?

CO: Politically speaking, the Kyoto protocol has had ripple effects across the world. A manufacturer on China now has to report its carbon footprint because its products are components of products sold in Europe. Clearly regulations are a driver – however, based on what we hear from our clients, their energy and environment efforts are not driven by politics. It’s good business sense that’s driving an increased focus. In a constrained world, we expect those drivers to get stronger.