Archive for February 2010
Live @ Pulse 2010: The Podcast Recap
Scott Laningham and I did an early morning podcast recap of IBM Pulse 2010, and then I promptly headed to the airport and back to snowy Austin.
In our recap, Scott and I discuss the key themes, announcements, and news coming out of IBM Pulse 2010…all in 8 minutes and 47 seconds!
Listen to the IBM Pulse 2010 Podcast Recap (MP3, 8:47)
Live @ Pulse 2010: Chesapeake’s Smarter City
At today’s IBM Pulse 2010 event here in Las Vegas, IBM and the City of Chesapeake, Virginia, announced how they’ve partnered to build a “smarter city,” one in which intelligent city-wide systems enhance public services, including public works, public utilities, public safety, and even its parks and recreation initiatives.
The use of IBM technology in this effort is enhancing services delivered to the public ranging from maintenance and operations of traffic signals and water systems to the management of the City’s Fire and Police Departments.
As a result of these efforts, the City of Chesapeake is consistently improving the quality of life for its citizens.
The Background
The City of Chesapeake is one of the larger cities in Virginia, covering some 353 square miles. It’s a diverse community, with suburban, urban, and rural areas, with with a business community that is equally diverse.
It includes more than 80 foreign-based companies from 19 different countries, and a city that has more miles of deep water canals, including the Intracoastal Waterway, than any other city in the U.S.
IBM software manages the maintenance of equipment and facilities for the Chesapeake Public Works Department, including the people and trucks using brine for snow removal at the City of Chesapeake Expressway Toll Plaza
The size and location of the city makes it a complex infrastructure to manage. These unique challenges can be addressed in part by using technology to collect and analyze data that can be used to improve how transportation, utility management, and public safety systems react to constantly changing conditions.
A Comprehensive Plan for a Smarter City
In accordance with its comprehensive plan, the City of Chesapeake is paving the way to a smarter future by currently investing more than $1.2M U.S. in capital improvement projects affecting community facilities, economic development, and other key departments.
“Technology is the power tool of today,” said Peter R. Wallace, CIO of the City of Chesapeake. “We’re using IBM Software to give staff the data and tools to continually improve processes, which is essential in this economy. The City of Chesapeake is less than 50 years old, but those founders inherited hundreds of years of infrastructure. Until now, we haven’t had a quick or convenient way to look at the City’s assets and make smart decisions. To succeed, we must be efficient in the way we work and transparent to our citizens. IBM is helping us accomplish those goals.”
IBM’s software is connecting city systems, and providing the various city departments with a transparent view of what’s going on at any given time. By analyzing the data and sharing the findings across departments, the city is able to detect and react to potential problems more quickly.
IBM: A Vision for Smarter Cities
A recent IBM Institute for Business Value report entitled “A Vision of Smarter Cities” asserts that the digitization of data within a city’s core systems will enable city managers to collect data on the efficiency of processes that could not be previously measured, like wastewater treatment. This, in turn, will lead to more informed decision-making and planning from city leaders.
Michael Fitchett, the City of Chesapeake Systems Development Coordinator and a former city firefighter, discussed at a press conference today hosted by Tivoli general manager Al Zollar his team’s efforts in building a smarter City of Chesapeake.
“When we went live in December 2008 with IBM Maximo asset management software, I never thought I’d be up here talking about a smarter city initiative. The system has allowed me and my team to see a lot of different facets and look across the entire environment of the city and to, in turn, provide our citizens with better services.
“My CIO looks at me everyday and says “ATA” — Accountability, Transparency, and Agility. I have a mayor who walks into the room and asks what our motto is: ‘We’re open for business.'”
Fitchett explained that he had strong management support, and that every day he is looking for “efficiencies and effectiveness” and explained what he considers to be the essence of a smarter city:
“Making sure we’re getting needed data out to our field personnel so that they can make real-time decisions: Working on a broken water main, perhaps having a video feed down that pipe to see proximity locations and able to analyze and instantly make critical infrastructure decisions.”
“The City of Chesapeake serves as a great example of how cities can take advantage of technology to provide citizens and businesses with a better, smarter place to live,” said Bill Sawyer, vice president of operations, IBM Maximo software. “By using these IBM technologies to better manage critical systems like water management and public safety, the city is both improving the quality of life for its citizens today and building a more sustainable future.”
Live @ Pulse 2010: Key Announcements
I attended a press conference earlier today hosted by IBM Tivoli software general manager, Al Zollar.
There, Zollar detailed some of the key announcements from the conference, and he was later joined by IBM customer City of Chesapeake to discuss their smarter city initiative.
This is how Zollar positioned these key announcements in the press release from yesterday:
“As the world becomes more instrumented, the growth of digital and physical data creates vast opportunities for organizations that integrate and interconnect these once disparate areas and assert control and accountability over all pieces of the business, whether in the data center or an oil field,” Zollar explained. “IBM helps clients build and manage the infrastructures that are behind the world’s most intelligent buildings, cities, utilities, offices, transportation systems and operations in every industry.”
Zollar started the press conference by explaining that a lot of the talk at the event was about operationalizing the infrastructure to build a smarter planet, and that the central launch idea of the conference was integrated service management.
That is, to take a single architecture and set of components and manage services (and risk!) across the data center, across the lifecycle, and in the context of individual industries.
Zollar reminded the audience of journalists and analysts of last week’s acquisition of Intelliden, which will help companies support their network layer and configurations around the globe.
Zollar also highlighted the fact that since 2005, IBM has invested some $5B U.S. to deliver a robust ISM suite, and that “we believe these investments are paying off.”
He highlighted the fact that IBM Tivoli’s asset management software line, Maximo, had grown 40% in 4Q09 alone (and this in a fairly flat cap X spending environment).
Zollar also took joy in pointing out that IBM had displaced some 220 HP customers and helped them migrate to the Tivoli ISM stack. Welcome!
Integrated Service Management for Industry Solutions
IBM made a number of key service, partner, and product announcements here at IBM Pulse 2010. Those are detailed as follows:
- New IBM Global Business Services is extending its capabilities around integrated service management for new industry-specific solutions Advanced Water Management and IBM Maximo Real-Time Asset Locator for Aerospace, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare and Manufacturing.
- IBM recently announced two new Solution Experience Labs simulating Smart Meter security risk in Austin, Texas, and La Gaude, France to help clients manage security risk with deploying Smart Meters.
- Property Portfolio Management – New IBM Global Business Services and IBM Maximo asset management software solution that extends Maximo to manage an entire portfolio of buildings into a consolidated location.
- Johnson Controls and Ricoh are announcing they are working with IBM to deliver intelligent building, facility and office solutions to reduce the carbon footprint.
- The Tennessee Valley Authority and Galveston National Labs are announcing they are working with IBM to create smarter buildings at world-class facilities that require the utmost precision and maintenance.
- Last week, IBM announced the acquisition of Intelliden, a leading provider of intelligent network automation software, to further build out its integrated service management portfolio and provide clients with better control of their network environments.
Integrated Service Management for Service Design and Delivery
- New IBM CloudBurst QuickStart Services are pre-integrated hardware, software, and services fit-for-purpose cloud workload compute platform that can be quickly and easily implemented into the client’s environment. IBM will provide installation, configuration, and education required to implement the IBM CloudBurst QuickStart Services solution.
- IBM now has more than 1,800 ‘ready to deploy’ solutions available in the IBM Tivoli Open Process Automation Library (OPAL). These solutions are integrations of leading business partner products with IBM software solutions that solve industry-specific and customer needs.
Integrated Service Management for the Data Center
- New IBM Information Archive enables policy-driven management of information across its lifecycle.
- IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images enables clients to discover, capture, store, deploy and standardize all physical and virtual images in a single repository managed from a single interface.
- IBM Tivoli Security Incident and Event Manager improves security by automating collection of distributed log information and tracking of abnormal behavior by privileged users – all from a common integrated dashboard, enabling better threat management and compliance reporting.
- New storage management offerings IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM Tivoli Fastback andIBM Tivoli Fastback for Workstations ensure duplicate files are backed up only once and recovery can now be managed from a single console.
- IBM Power7 with IBM Systems Director and VMControl provide an integrated system of hardware, software and services including Integrated Service Management capabilities developed through a relationship between IBM Tivoli Software and IBM Systems Technology Group to enable a fully virtualized infrastructure providing rapid deployment at lower cost.
Live @ Pulse 2010: Security and the Smarter Planet
In today’s general session at IBM Pulse 2010, IBM Tivoli VP of marketing, Doug Brown, kicked off the morning by introducing Helene Armitage, GM of System Software, IBM Systems and Technology Group.
Armitage outlined the opportunity presented by integrated service management and its linkage to virtualization, workload optimization, the use of new delivery models, and the need to integrate.
Armitage explained that heterogeneous infrastructure-wide virtualization can deliver systems efficiency (say that three times quickly), as opposed to siloed management of individual platforms. By “managing through a single pane of glass,” organizations can consolidate resources and reduce their complexity, in turn improving their efficiency.
She also discussed the “self-provisioning” of services and resources, whereby companies could leverage the most cost effective provider of the necessary service. She highlighted one example, SK telecom, a Korean mobile communications provider which had three large data centers with around 1,000 servers, and which deployed a cloud computing platform with IBM to enable quick development and testing of new services.
Another highlight of the keynote were several IBM customers (including a panel discussion), as well as IBM Chief Privacy Officer and VP, Security Counsel, Harriet Pearson’s thoughtful look at security and data privacy in the smarter planet realm.
Pearson explained that 71% of CIOs around the world are concerned about risk management and compliance, but that business needed to view risk management through a lends of opportunity, not liability.
Though admittedly there has been an explosion of regulatory activity in governments around the globe…and a 500X increase in Web links last year that could harm your company…despite these, and other challenges and threats, we can’t go on the way we have been: Bolting on security or risk management after we’ve installed new systems or introduced a new initiative.
We could try, but the planet is getting smarter, and so must we.
The state of security on the smarter planet is complex, no doubt. As the planet gets more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, that presents new possibilities, complexities, and risks (critical infrastructure protection, privacy and identity, cloud security, etc.)
Where’s the data? Who has access to it? Who knows who, and who knows who is who??
No question, people like lower crime, less traffic, better health outcomes…all the things a smarter planet can potentially provide. But people are also increasingly uncomfortable with “them” having all this information about us.
So, we must change how we approach security and privacy, and risk management in general, in our business and our policymaking.
Plan security and privacy from the start, not as an afterthought. “Security by design,” which is about driving innovation while reducing risk.
Security by design is an enabler of innovative change, not simply a risk prevention measure.
Pearson closed by identifying a number of ways IBM is helping clients get smarter about security.
For example, by safely adopting new forms of technology like cloud computing and virtualization. Enabling new business models like teleworking and outsourcing. Addressing emerging compliance constructs, while decreasing operations costs.
And, to the point of consumer concerns, addressing consumer expectations of privacy by assuring trusted brand status, while also assuring the integrity of quality and availability of information required for real-time decision making.
The state of security on our smarter planet is good, but with some investment and focus, and planning up front, it could be so much better, and in turn, provide businesses with new opportunities to be “in compliance” with both regulatory regimes as well as key business objectives.
Al Gore’s Smarter (and Funnier!) Planet — The Podcast Edition
Greetings. Thx to Scott Laningham, I was able to turn my recent recap of the Al Gore keynote into a podcast.
You can click here to listen (MP3, 8:27) to the full dispatch, Turbo audio style!
Live @ Pulse 2010: Second Day Buzz
Greetings from 5:47 A.M. Las Vegas time, live in my room at the MGM Signature.
Yesterday was a great start to Pulse 2010, I must say. There was quite a buzz in the air, and even though I was stuck in the MGM “biosphere” for the entirety of the day, I found the content of the opening session and Al Gore’s keynote to be quite compelling.
And the demo of The Venetian and its “smart” city-within-a-city was particularly compelling, and judging from the Twitter comments I saw, you all in the audience really enjoyed it as well. If you wish to show the demo to your colleagues back at the office, you can view it here on YouTube.
As part of yesterday’s festivities, IBM made some key announcements, including around the notion of building smarter buildings.
As I already posted, IBM has partnered with Johnson Controls to optimize energy usage and improve security for clients in more than 150 countries. This new smart building solution will help clients improve asset performance, sustainability, productivity, and safety across buildings and portfolios of buildings.
“Smarter buildings are key to the economic and environmental sustainability of urban environments,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, Energy and Environment for IBM, about the announcement. “Real-time infrastructure data coupled with analytics can enable better economic decisions and environmental outcomes. Together with an array of partners, we are delivering this value to clients today.”
IBM also announced it is working with Ricoh on an advanced device and printing management system which infuses office devices with real-time tracking and monitoring to help firms significantly reduce their print-related costs, improve service and also cut back on carbon emissions.
Gartner has estimated organizations can save between 10 and 30 percent of their printing costs if they better manage their printer, copier, and fax fleets.
You can keep up with all the Pulse-related announcements on this page here.
As for getting Tuesday off to a similarly roaring start, don’t forget this morning’s keynote session will be co-hosted by IBM Chief Privacy Officer and VP, Security Counsel, Harriet Pearson, and IBM System and Technology Group GM Helene Armitage.
Harriet and Helene will explore how integrated service management can meet the needs of a smarter planet, with a particular eye on the practical concerns of managing growth, reducing costs and ensuring security.
See you at the MGM Grand Arena!
Live @ IBM Pulse 2010: Integrated Service Management
Before we heard earlier today from Al Gore, we heard from that other Al, Tivoli’s own Al Zollar, the general manager of Tivoli software for IBM, on the subject of integrated service management.
Al Zollar took the stage bright and early to explain what’s going on in the external environment, that signs of the smarter planet are all around us, and that they have the potential to change the way people, business, and processes operate, and how Tivoli is working to optimize the world’s infrastructure — physical and digital — so we can all live and work smarter, not harder.
Al talked about the proliferation we’re seeing, of instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent devices, and how we’re helping deliver innovative services we couldn’t have dreamt of ten short years ago.
Here’s what we’ve learned thus far, according to Al: That you all (our customers) are dealing with amazing levels of complexity growing due to the new devices and services being added each day.
Of the skyrocketing number of security threats that you all deal with every single day.
And that yet, with the lack of integration of yesterday’s tools and processes, many organizations are not able to “see” and manage it all effectively.
As Al observed, “You can’t effectively manage with an Excel spreadsheet.”
The sheer volume of dependencies is absurd, and a single transaction can yet now cross multiple application domains. Any change in one of these in such an environment can wreak havoc.
Just a single change can have up to 1 billion permutations. Now THAT is complexity.
Al then launched into a number of Tivoli case studies. The Capitol Region of Denmark, for example, whose countless backup requirements for each hospital it supports can range to massive amounts of data duplication distributed across three different storage sites and over 1.5 petabytes of information.
They were able to overcome their storage management challenges with only 4 people and an integrated service management portfolio from IBM Software.
Or the U.S. Air Force, which has 100 bases and 700,000 military personnel around the world, and where “mission critical” takes on a whole new meaning.
The Air Force is leveraging ISM in a cloud environment from IBM to help overcome its challenges.
Service lifecycle management and dashboards; unified management of service requests and incidents; asset management; and automated management, all are what’s needed to reduce complexity in today’s smarter planet, all through three single core concepts: Visibility, control, and automation.
To help matters, IBM today announced that its Energy and Utilities Centers in LaGaude, France, and Austin, Texas, were now open for business — if you can lock down the grid, you can lock down just about any connected infrastructure.
Zollar then introduced new releases of several key products, including Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images; IBM Information Archive; Tivoli Security Information and Event Manager; Tivoli Storage Manager; and Fastback Solutions.
He also announced new partnerships with Ricoh, Johnson Controls, and Juniper Networks.
Rational Software GM Danny Sabbah then took the stage to observe the role design and delivery has played in the ongoing evolution of the American automobile.
In 1977, Sabbah observed, the Oldsmobile Toronado had a single computer unit for spark plug timing.
Today, a car is more like 30 computer on wheels, with 100 million lines of code and with more software than the complex controls used on the retiring U.S. Space Shuttle!
The car as data center on wheels.
Sabbah suggested we must stop this madness that development, deployment and operations are separate and distinct processes.
He also said that the Looming Business Crisis demands linkage, that we need to drive fundamental change in design and delivery in order to be able to achieve the goal of ISM. Because when critical services and applications “go down or slow down,” they cost time, money, and, ultimately, customer loyalty.
Finally, Laura Sanders and Mike Rhodin brought things to a close with a compelling case study featuring The Venetian hotel’s “smarter city within a city” demonstration, and a look at the industry frameworks IBM Software is putting in place to put ISM in the context that matters most, the business of your business.
Ultimately, businesses and organizations can’t just be content with optimization: They must innovate.
We’ll be sure to hear more about this innovation over the next couple of days.
Al Gore’s Smarter (and Funnier!) Planet
Never mind your political sentiments about Al Gore the politician, what you may not know about “the former next president of the United States,” as he jokingly refers to himself, is that the former U.S. vice president is very, very funny.
Really! Would I kid about something so serious as a former vice president?
In his keynote at this morning’s IBM Pulse 2010 opening session, Gore made me laugh so hard I wanted to cry…not only because of his very folksy yet hilarious delivery, but also due to the severity and great consequences of his important message.
Before you think I’m about to step up onto my soapbox, know that Gore was very cautious not to step up onto his in today’s keynote.
He knew that by coming to an IBM conference to speak to a very business-friendly audience, that he was potentially walking into enemy territory — despite the enormous sum I suspect we paid him to come and speak.
Gore walked into the room of 5,000+ at the MGM Grand Arena with eyes wide open, and with a sobering message that presented as much a cheerleading challenge to global business as an indictment of existing short-term inclined business practices or climate abuse.
Al Gore Speaks at IBM Pulse opening session in Las Vegas, February 22, 2010
The former vice president asserted that the climate crisis did not exist in a vacuum, and like any interconnected system, was joined at a nexus of two other key crises, one economic and involving our recent collective business philandering, the other one national security-related, with the ongoing U.S. role in continuing to buy cheap oil despite the long-term moral consequences.
“As long as we are so vulnerable to expensive energy resources in foreign countries that are not among the most stabile or friendly to us, there will be a national security threat associated with that,” Gore warned, the that being the notion of sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to those unfriendly foreign countries, then backstopping those petro dollars with American military might.
He also noted that we’re putting 90M tons of CO2 every day into a thin sheath of atmosphere that you or I could drive to (if we could drive straight up) in a matter of minutes, and that the vast majority of the existing heat as a result was being reformulated into our oceans.
But let’s assume you’re just not hip to Gore’s whole climate warming message.
That’s cool (is it getting warmer in here?), but still and all you can’t deny the economic consequences of being dependent on that foreign energy: Every time we see a sudden increase in prices, we see an economic shockwave, investments suddenly dissipate, and we lose valuable time and have to start the cycle all over again with the next petroleum price increase.
So what’s a wandering, unemployed, itinerant, environmentalist ex-American vice president suggest that we do?
Gore alleges that all these things are connected by a common thread, and that if you pull the thread hard enough, you hold at least part of the answer in your hand: A shift to renewable sources of energy, natch; reduced carbon emissions, controversial though it is; but most importantly of all, a new reliance on efficiency.
Said Gore, “We are in the presence of one of the greatest opportunities in the history of business to become much more efficient and eliminate waste, pollution, and losses all at the same time.”
You’ll note that Gore said in the history of business, not in the history of the world. Methinks that was most intentional.
Even if you don’t buy into the evidence of the climate crisis, efficiency is by all odds the most productive business strategy around, and to that point, Gore himself came out and said that IBM’s smarter planet campaign “just feels right to me.”
I could envision IBM marketing executives across the company salivating (or perhaps cursing?) the implied endorsement.
Nevertheless, with great opportunity comes great responsibility.
Gore explained that the “hinge of history is swinging,” that with all this talk about complexity and complex systems at the Pulse conference, the audience needs to understand that our entire global civilization was going through a very challenging reorganization, leaving business, governments, even individuals around the world trying to figure out where they land in the great reorganization of 2010.
Alas, there’s no org chart that can explain that one, but Gore did explain there are natural places to start, that, for example, we’re extremely wasteful in the way that we use energy in buildings and cities — here in the US about 40% of all the CO2 emissions comes from buildings, another set of legacy technologies we’ve used a little too long.
So how to address these challenges and not instead disappear into the Nevada desert crying out in hopeless hysterics?
Well, we can start by getting better and more relevant information (using technology and the like), and that when there are important factors that are systematically ignored, to use that “better” information to make our own choices.
That, in fact, we all have an opportunity to get all the information relevant to decisions we make everyday in this challenging environment, and to the “pulse” of the conference theme, to automate some of those decisions so that we can free up the RPMs to focus clearly on the Key Major Decisions and be able to better see how they relate to one another.
“If you analyze the human brain as the same terms for computers,” Gore explained, “we have a low bitrate and very high resolution. In making decisions about vast amounts of data, if you try to do it bit by bit, you’ll never succeed.
“But if you can portray the context of all that info, that is a good strategy, whether in healthcare, or city management, or whatever, it is really important to get a clear view of where it’s going.”
Gore went on to say that “using the right kind of information, software, hardware, is your most powerful set of tools in your toolset,” and that this time around, business is leading the way, and that governments have not stepped up to the plate on this (with a few exceptions).
Finally, Gore used more cornpone charm to explain his reaction to the outcome of last December’s climate negotiations in Copenhagen: “I feel fine.”
Explaining, it’s kind of like the old farmer who, upon hauling a big cow to market in the back up of the pickup truck has a bad traffic accident, only to have the highway patrolman come along and shoot the injured cow right between the eyes to put the poor thing out of his misery, whereupon the farmer responds to the question from the same said patrolman when asked how he (the farmer) feels, and as he looks over at the cow explains: “I feel fine.”
The role of business in providing essential leadership is more important than ever, Gore started to wind down, asking us to remember that this is one of those moments in history where “it’s difficult to imagine the scale and scope of the changes that lie ahead of us.”
But imagine it we must.
Gore closed by citing that old African proverb, which was simplistic in its essence, but again concise in its expressed urgency:
If you want to go quickly, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.
Concluded the former next president of these United States, “We must go far, quickly.”
Building Smarter Buildings
If you’ve visited this blog with any frequency, you know that I’ve visited a few cities around the globe in my time — four of them in the last week alone (Stuttgart, Madrid, Milan, and now Las Vegas).
For several years, I lived in a big city (New York), and opted in 2001 to move to a smaller, but still vibrant, city, Austin, Texas, where I worked for several years on Tivoli’s Web site (see today’s CNN Morning show for a feature on how Austin’s economy has thrived during the recession!)
With an estimated 60 million people around the world moving into cities each year, experts predict population in the world’s cities are going to double by 2050. As populations grow, civic leaders and businesses alike are looking for ways to help cities and their buildings cope.
Too often today, many of the systems that constitute a building — heat, water, sewage, electricity — are managed independently and, typically, inefficiently.
Buildings alone are a source of huge waste. They account for 70 percent of all energy use and 38 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. That’s a lot of hot air!
That means, ultimately, that each year buildings emit more harmful CO2 emissions into the environment than do our vehicles (and as Al Gore mentioned in this morning’s Pulse keynote).
The culprits leading to such inefficiencies are varied: Poor planning and maintenance, inadequate energy management, the heating or cooling of unused space, and the inability to collect and analyze operational information.
Today, IBM and Johnson Controls have partnered in a joint initiative called Smart Building Solution, which combines the power of business analytics from IBM with the building technology and energy efficiency solutions of Johnson Controls to help address some of these inefficiencies.
This partnership is intended to help improve operations, lower costs, and reduce energy and water use in buildings and will be targeted at public sector, education, and large commercial real estate owners and industrial facilities.
Read more about this expanded partnership between IBM and Johnson Controls in this post by earth2tech.
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