IBM's green push

Building on software and services the company already has, IBM pledged to push green issues harder to the company’s clients by urging them to use software which would make them and their businesses more energy efficient.

A year ago, in May 2007, IBM said it would start coughing up $1 billion a year as part of its “Project Big Green”, to develop technologies which would slash data centre energy consumption. Now the company claims it has come up with “key new capabilities” in moving towards its goal.

One set of products, touted by IBM as being able to manage power better, reduce carbon emissions and lower costs to boots is Tivoli software, a systems management tool. Another is WebsPhere virtual Enterprise which purportedly has application infrastructure virtualisation capabilities, for managing enterprise applications and SOA environments at lower energy and operational costs.

Rational Team Concert is another product IBM said could help people cut down on C02 by enabling in-context collaboration for multi-site software development and collaboration.

IBM said that it would also give clients “self-assessment tools” which it reckons would help them make a start on setting out green goals and then trying to achieve them.

According to Al Zollar, general manager of Tivoli Software, "while most people think of energy conservation from a hardware perspective, increasingly it is actually software that is providing more options to go green across the entire organization”.

The company points out that with energy costs on the up and oil prices skyrocketing, companies had better start thinking of cutting their emissions, and fast. Slashing carbon emissions isn’t the only problem either. Companies will also have to seriously consider using less water if they want to do their bit for the planet. Data centers are pushing power and capacity cooling limits ever more frequently, and the phenomenon could potentially severely stunt future growth of IT services.

With this in mind, IBM has decided to focus its green energy on three main areas of software. The first is providing online tools which would reduce people’s need to travel for business; the second is providing software with increased automation which the company somehow thinks would increase power efficiency and the third is beefing up infrastructure maintenance to consolidate and virtualise IT, apparently maximizing efficiency based on demand.