IBM and the Environment

From Lauraibm

Contents

MI Summary

Full article: IBM and the Environment

Coverage in the Press

Text of IBM Articles on IBM and its close partners

Analyst Views and IBM

Summaries

Full article: IBM moves into carbon consulting (23-Aug-07)

IBM moves to add carbon consulting to its huge global business consulting operation. Demand for such services is being driven by competitive pressures to be seen as green as well as by all-but-inevitable caps on greenhouse gas emissions. Adds Clark, who is director of strategic insights at IBM's Venture Capital Group in Silicon Valley: "It becomes a competitiveness issue when everyone else is doing it and you look like the ogre of the block if you don't." He says the pressure is particularly intense in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google (GOOG), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) increasingly compete on carbon.

"There are some humongous pitfalls in working out carbon footprints," notes Williams. "There is no agreed protocol for calculating carbon footprints. You’re going to have people make all kinds of claims." He says figuring out the carbon content of transportation and packaging is comparatively easy while calculating the carbon content of an individual product "is a tough nut to crack." Says Clark: "We think the added value is being able to integrate carbon accounting with the rest of your business.

Full article: IBM: Dinosaurs were green (1-Aug-07)

IBM has announced that it is to consolidate 3,900 of its data center servers on to just 30 mainframe systems running the Linux operating system on virtual servers as part of its ongoing "Big Green" energy efficiency project. The project will span six IBM data centers in the US, England, Japan and Australia. The consolidated units will run Linux on top of the mainframes' operating system, z/VM.

Comment: "I live a couple of towns away from where IBM got their start (Endicott, NY), and those guys don't exactly have much of a green rep around here. In 1979, 4,100 gallons of methyl chloroform were spilled by IBM. While investigating that, a large plume of trichloroethene, tetrachloroethene, dichloroethane, dichloroethene, methylene chloride, vinyl chloride, and freon 113 was discovered in the groundwater. Later on benzene, toluene and xylene were also found."

Full article: IT Goes Green to keep Companies Growing (6-Sep-07)

Today the typical server consumes four times the amount of power that an average system used just five years ago. With this surge in IT energy consumption, power costs are also soaring, increasing an average of 20% over the course of the last eight years. IBM is taking a leadership role in this effort, investing $1 billion across its business units in programs and technology to help its enterprise customers dramatically reduce their cost base by providing them with the consulting expertise and the products to improve the energy efficiency of their data centre environments.

Full article: Lisa Lindblom on 2007 Market Outlook – 2Q07

For IBM, the challenge is how to channel our image in Engineering domain expertise and Business expertise into the Specific Solutions that decision-makers are focused in key environmental issues and do not perceive IBM as credible in. Venture Capital investment in clean energy is up 10 fold in six years. Battery technology, biofuels, energy intelligence, fuel cells, and solar energy make up the majority of that investment. In a recent survey, 30% of executives cited environmental issues to be one of their top concerns affecting future shareholder value--an issue that didn’t even make the list just a few years ago.

Where IBM Is Less Credible: Technical domain expertise, Chemical, Biological, Environmental, Product domain expertise, Energy, Water, Drugs, Tires. “I just don’t think they have the environmental expertise to address our specific needs.”

Full article: Performance Per Watt on Power6: Same Thermals, More Work (22-Aug-07)

Tim P-M still thinks that IBM should be positioning a line of System i servers with low-power main memory, small form factor SAS disks that use a lot less electricity, and maybe even solid state disks that use very little power. To be competitive, the Power6 line of servers should be the unquestionable leader in performance per watt, because this is what will get a salesperson in the data center door these days.

An i5/OS box that can do transactions with half the energy for the same money will win deals. And with a mix of Web-enabled 5250 workloads and the right hardware, the System i can win in such competitive situations--even against System p boxes running Java. If he were running IBM, that is what he would be building a line of Power6-based System i machines and their marketing message around.

Full article: Could IBM Be the World's First Green Business Behemoth? (22-Aug-07)

IBM could be about to enter another phase in its history. The company's focus has remained steadfastly on the world of IT. But there are indications the company could be returning to its eclectic roots, and it is the burgeoning demands of the low carbon economy that appear to be driving this diversification.

  • IBM's recent partnership with U.S. electricity provider CenterPoint and its investment in research into smart grid technologies capable of smoothing the path towards adoption renewable energy and dramatically cutting energy consumption by providing people with real-time visibility over their energy use.
  • The company's newly revealed interest in in-car technologies, provides Exhibit B. The focus on the development of a car operating system capable of ultimately automating driving may not seem like a particularly green initiative, but when you consider one of the prime goals of such technologies would be to optimise fuel efficiency and ease traffic congestion it is clear a pattern is beginning to emerge.
  • Of course, these initiatives along with the overarching Project Big Green commitment to limit IBM's carbon footprint and enhance the energy efficiency of its servers and other data center technologies still fit into IBM's core IT portfolio.
  • But perhaps the most compelling clue that Big Blue could diversify comes in the form of reports that it is investing heavily in developing photovoltaic technology. According to a recent story over at the Cleantech Blog IBM is using its expertise in semi-conductors to make rapid progress in developing photovoltaic solar technology.

Demand for green products and services is set to soar, but at the moment the supply side of this market remains extremely immature. Consultancies such as SustainAbility and the myriad of cleantech start ups may have experience in the sector, but they all lack the scale large corporate customers will look for when procuring green products and services. Meanwhile, those large multinationals that have been most vocal about their green product lines are either entirely consumer-focused operations, such as supermarkets, or energy and car firms guilty of running their green divisions as niche concerns alongside their traditional polluting businesses.

In contrast, IBM, and several other large IT companies for that matter, are perhaps the best positioned to meet the demand for green services:

  1. they provide the software and hardware that underpins all modern businesses;
  2. they boast relatively low impact business models compared to heavy industries;
  3. they have the engineering expertise in house that would allow them to diversify into other cleantech sectors;
  4. and they often run large consultancy arms already well versed in managing business transformations.

IBM is as well positioned as any company to become the first green business multinational.

Full article: Servers move from a guzzle to a sip, on w3 (1-Aug-07)

IBM is not jumping on the green bandwagon. We’ve been driving it for nearly 40 years. Now IBM is dramatically simplifying our IT infrastructure, identifying almost 4,000 distributed servers at its data centers around the world whose work will be consolidated onto about 30 mainframes. Power and cooling costs alone will be reduced by a 80%.

Since Thomas Watson’s call to action in 1971, IBM has been an environmental leader. In 1973, CEO Frank Cary updated IBM’s corporate policy on environmental protection, stating: “IBM will reduce to a minimum the ecological impact of all its activities."

Full article: System i and the green skeptic (16-Jul-07)

The article wonders whether System i really is more energy-efficient per workload than the equivalent computing power of scaled-out x86 boxes, because of its higher utilisation and use of virtualisation and logical partitions. (Does anyone really believe that IBM’s endeavours are environmentally altruistic?) It applauds the Power6 processor, which is twice as fast as the previous generation using almost no more energy.

Full article: Turning your Servers green

IBM, HP, Sun and AMD have launched The Green Grid, a non-profit consortium which aims to cut energy consumption at computer data centres by encouraging power-saving measures.

Full article: Lenovo tops eco-friendly league

Lenovo is top (displacing Nokia) and Apple is bottom of Greenpeace's league table. Lenovo offers take-back and recycling in all countries where it operates.

Links to IBM papers on the Environment

For an overview on the topic(s), see also

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