Cisco acquisitions and alliances in the fast-growing smart grid market

Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Arch Rock Corporation, which provides internet protocol-based wireless network technology for smart-grid applications. 

Cisco says that the acquisition of the privately-owned, San Francisco-based company will help it offer an open-standards based IP infrastructure for smart meters. Arch Rock's technology helps utilities connect smart meters over a multi-way wireless mesh network, which adds value to Cisco’s IP-based, end-to-end smart-grid offerings, which we discussed last month.

Yesterday’s acquisition announcement came just a day after Cisco revealed a collaboration with Itron, a leading provider of smart metering, data collection and utility software systems. The two companies will collaborate on developing a ‘standards-based, highly secure technology for full IPv6 implementation of field area communications to support smart metering, intelligent distribution automation and interfaces to the customer premise’. The idea is to provide interoperability between wired and wireless communications among the various components of the smart grid.

Itron will license and embed Cisco IP technology within its OpenWay meters as well as distribute Cisco networking equipment and software as part of its smart meter deployments.

Laura Ipsen, Cisco senior vice president and general manager for the Smart Grid business unit said: "The alliance between Cisco and Itron represents a major step forward in the realisation of a modern, more intelligent energy infrastructure. Together, we aim to enable standardisation of the smart-grid architecture and help create an end-to-end communications platform".

The company said that Arch Rock acquisition would complement the strategic alliance with Itron.

 

Cisco is pushing hard into the smart grid communications space, looking to replicate its dominance in internet infrastructure. Given the opportunities it’s no surprise.

Market research company SBI Reports, through its SBI Energy brand, has identified smart grids as one of six clean energy markets that will change life as we know it in the next five years – details are here.

The report points out that implementing and integrating renewable energy sources is contingent on the upgrade of existing electrical grids around the world. SBI Energy sees the global smart grid market climbing by nearly 150% between 2009 and 2014, reaching $171bn in 2014, with the US market doubling over the timeframe to about $43bn by 2014.

Sony Europe launches ‘Open Planet Ideas’ to generate eco technology applications

On Wednesday Sony Europe, supported by WWF, launched Open Planet Ideas, an online community ‘incubator’ for collaborative technology solutions to critical environmental issues. To quote the web site “Open Planet Ideas is a place where you can collaborate to identify environmental issues and then tackle them as a community using Sony technology in new and clever ways”. 

Community members can draw their inspiration from the environmental information hosted on the platform, which will give a snapshot of current environmental challenges based on the latest facts and figures assembled by WWF.

The approach of re-using existing technologies apparently comes from a project last year. A group of young people in California thought up the idea of using Sony’s IPELA security cameras, wireless networks and photo-stitching software to create an online community of citizen firewatchers in a high-risk forest fire area.

Open Planet Ideas will remain open until January 2011 and then the most viable concepts – as selected by the community and a panel of top Sony and WWF experts – will be taken to the next stage of technical and environmental viability. Those that thought up the idea will then work with a Sony design team to bring the idea to fruition. So if you’ve got any bright ideas, off you go.

 

It’s a great concept and may well generate some interesting ideas for green technology applications. What we really need, though, is the same thing on a wider scale and not tied to a specific make of technology. Just generating innovative ideas of how to apply existing technology to help address our environmentally challenges would be useful. Particularly given the poor showing of Green IT in enabling carbon reduction, as revealed in the Fujitsu research I reported on the other day.

Oracle has announced the availability of its new utilities smart meter data management software

Oracle has announced the availability of it’s Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management 2.0 software, aimed at helping utilities manage the vast amount of energy and water consumption data collected through the deployment of smart meters. It’s a component of the company’s Utilities Smart Meter Platform.

Using the Smart Meter Platform utilities can turn consumption data into useful intelligence, enabling them to improve services, better control costs and respond to meter-related events.

Oracle maintains that the new version gets round the problem of integrating customer information systems with meter data management systems. Utilities can continue to access custom, legacy systems whilst retaining the flexibility to configure an IT solution to meet the goals of future smart grid initiative.

The software also includes a centralised device portal. As well as providing customer service support it also contains tools that help utilities view/edit interval data, look for signs of tampering or theft, view/analyse audit records and examine weather patterns to determine usage variations.

Over the next year Oracle plans to add more applications to the platform, including business intelligence, a smart grid gateway and support of communication to customers regarding usage and efficiency programs.

 

It’s no surprise that Oracle is putting a lot of effort into its smart meter/smart grid software, given the global opportunities it represents. There’s a lot of competition, but Oracle is well-entrenched in the utilities market and developing its offering fast.

Fujitsu releases Green IT benchmark report – US, UK, Australia and India

Fujitsu has released the results of a multi-country benchmarking exercise to assess the maturity of Green IT practices and
technologies in end user organisations.  It’s based on a survey of over 630 CIOs and senior IT managers of large IT-using organisations in the US, UK, Australia and India.

The methodology, developed by Australian sustainability consultancy Connection Research and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), looks at the maturity of organisations across four main pillars of Green IT; equipment lifecycle, end-user computing, enterprise computing and IT as a green enabler. The methodology allows the implementation of Green IT to be quantified and compared between countries and industry sectors.

The full report is here, but the research found that the overall Green IT maturity level is low – the index for all respondents is just 56.4 (out of 100). The best performing country of the four surveyed is the UK, with an overall Green IT Readiness Index of 61.0, followed by the US with a score of 58.6, Australia (53.9), let down by its low level of measurement, and India (52.0), where end user Green IT is not widely implemented.

The two operational components of Green IT
that were found to be most mature were End User Computing, which includes the use of PCs, laptops and printers, and Enterprise Computing, primarily servers. Perhaps it’s no real surprise, given that these are the two most visible aspects of IT, the focus of a lot of the Green IT technologies and practices and where Green IT often goes hand-in-hand with short-term cost savings.

Nor is it any great surprise (although some disappointment) that Enablement, i.e. using IT to reduce the carbon footprint elsewhere in the organisation, is scored much lower. As the report points out, it reflects the continued inward focus of many Green IT initiatives.

What is more of a surprise is the fact that Metrics, i.e. the process of measuring and monitoring green initiatives in the organisation, is the least mature aspect. You would think (and hope) that monitoring the success would be an essential part of any green activity in a company, but it seems to remain a low priority.

The best performing industry sectors are IT/Communications/Media, followed by Professional Services and Utilities/Construction. But the report notes that the differences between industry sectors are similar across the countries surveyed, indicating that Green IT performance is at least as much a function of industry sector as it is of country.

 

Having had a very small part in this research, it’s interesting to see the overall results. It’s not always comfortable reading because it highlights how much more there is that Green IT could and should be doing, but the detail does give a good impression of where we are now. It would be interesting to see how these scores change in the coming years. For example, I would expect to see the metrics aspect start to catch up quite quickly in the next year or two.

GHG Protocol completes testing of new standards

More than 60 companies have completed the road testing of two new GHG Protocol standards. The GHG Protocol is a standard methodology for measuring greenhouse gas emissions developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) based on input from businesses, governments and NGOs. It’s the de-facto standard for emissions measurement and is the basis for most emissions legislation.

• Since the launch of the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard in 2001 companies have become proficient at calculating emissions from GHG sources that they own or control (scope 1) and emissions from grid-sourced electricity and the other utility services (scope 2).  Scope 3 – other indirect emissions – covers a variety of activities in the corporate value chain but has often only been reported as business travel.

In the light of increasing interest by reporting companies and increasing demand from stakeholders for scope 3 emissions to be accounted and reported, the new Scope 3 (Corporate Value Chain) Accounting and Reporting Standard methodology has been developed and tested.

• The Product Lifecycle Accounting and Reporting Standard provides a method to account for emissions associated with individual products across their life-cycles. Since for many products, particularly in the IT sector, more energy is used, and emissions generated, in product manufacture than in use, this is of particular interest to potential purchasers.

In all 62 companies from various industry sectors and 17 countries have tested the two standards - ICT companies that participated included Autodesk, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Lenovo, SAP and Siemens. In June, the testers submitted written feedback on their usability along with final GHG inventory reports. (A summary of the feedback is posted on the GHG Protocol website).

The companies that road tested the new Scope 3 standard found it ‘achievable’ to complete an inventory and many companies believe it practical to complete one on an annual basis.

The companies that road tested the Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard similarly reported that they had little difficulty completing an inventory and found the guidance provided in the draft helpful.

The next steps will be to revise the standards based on the feedback received, as well as from the Steering Committee and Technical Working Groups. The revised standards will be released at the end of September for a 30 day public comment period. The text will be finalised at the end of 2010 and the final versions will be published by March 2011.

 

This is useful stuff.  There’s a great need for more comprehensive methodologies for emissions accounting in both these areas and it looks like they’re well on the way now. It will both expand the usability of the GHG protocol as well as helping to standardise reporting. It’s also another factor that will help drive the carbon management software market, as well as adding another challenge to solutions providers to include these new methodologies.

Interestingly, the new standards also seem to have a broader emissions management value. Most of the road testers agreed that the standards help in identifying GHG reduction opportunities and prioritising efforts, allowed better supply chain GHG management, improved understanding of the risks and opportunities associated with emissions in the supply chain and were a factor in creating competitive advantage and product differentiation. So implementing the new methodologies could also lead to more active GHG management across the organisation.

Wipro announces Fluid State modular data centres

Wipro has joined the modular data centre market with the launch of its FluidState data centre from Wipro Infotech.

Targeted at small, medium and enterprise businesses (isn’t that everyone?), the FluidState data centre is a predesigned, prefabricated facility that can be setup in less than a week, ‘almost 10 times faster than a conventional data centre’.

‘FluidState’ stands for flexible, lean, upgradable, intelligent data centre, standardised for accelerated deployment. The data centre incorporates technology from Cisco, HP, Hitachi and EMC, among others and the modular design means that it can be upgraded (or downgraded) without any downtime.

Apart from the advantages of modularity and the fact that it is optimised for efficiency, cooling, power and space, the data centres have other green advantages in terms of a unified computing environment with 24x7 lights out operation, capacity on demand, four times higher density per rack, up to 40% lower cooling cost and reduced carbon footprint. The data centre uses virtualisation and highest density in its building blocks.

It’s certainly the data centre market to be in these days, combining both low initial cost and low carbon footprint with flexibility. Just being modular means that customers are not powering and cooling large unused server halls from the start. They can also use the latest technology as they expand, getting greener as they go along.

Kyocera UK survey shows there’s still much to do in green printing

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that printing doesn’t seem to be getting the green IT focus it deserves. Well research from Kyocera seems to back up the need for more effort in the area. 

The research was conducted by Loudhouse on behalf of Kyocera UK and comprised 1,000 online interviews with UK office workers and another 200 with IT managers. The interviews were with companies of 500 or more people. The full report is here.

The survey initially asked about attitudes towards environmental issues amongst UK businesses and found that the percentage of UK employees stating that they were concerned about environmental issues fell from 77% in 2008 to 63% in 2010. When asked specifically about climate change, the figures were even starker, with concern down to 50% from 65% in 2008.

When it comes to printing, the survey found that there had been a net increase over the last year.

The chart below shows the extent to which various green policies and practices are in place around printing. While more than three quarters of the IT Managers interviewed said that they had paper recycling facilities available, there is little being done to limit printing in the first place. The only other action taken by the majority of IT managers was to put a ‘green’ printing message on the bottom of emails.

The office workers reported the major reasons for ‘wasted’ printing were printing the wrong document, leaving printouts behind on the printer, printing too many copies and preferring to read on paper.  But they also freely admitted that it was their own efforts that would have most positive impact, rather than being forced to by company policy.

There is also some clear resistance from office workers to some aspects of reducing printing. For instance, there are significant concerns about confidentiality and convenience in sharing printers, although those that already shared were less concerned than those that had their own printers.

 

There’s clearly much to be done to reduce wasted printing, but simply introducing policies and procedures is not enough. Printers need to be set up to make it as easy as possible for users to avoid wastage, but beyond that a great deal of education seems to be in order. But apart from the green benefits there’s much cost to be saved for the effort.