IT goes green
IT goes green
"The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response." Or so said the Stern report published by the government in October 2006.
The gist of Stern's 500-page report is simple. Doing something about the underlying causes of global warming will take decades and cost billions, but not doing anything will be much, much worse. One of the villains of the peace is CO2, gushed into the atmosphere during electricity generation and the transportation of people and cargo.
Energy prices are bound to increase. Government policy is fairly blunt: it normally comes down to hitting the consumer hard with tax until people apologise and start behaving morally. As a way of changing behaviour of businesses, tax is a start. Businesses have had a foretaste of rising energy bills already and are putting fuel-economy on the agenda.
Inevitably these changes in priority will affect their purchase of ICT. In competitive markets lower running costs are immediately felt on the bottom line. In short, 'going green' first could give a competitive advantage. What might this mean for telecom gear?
A move to IP technology might not be a bad thing, power-wise. IP trunking reduces electricity consumption by eliminating power-hungry ISDN cards and a cooler-running PBX might mean less use of air con. The case for IP phones is less clear-cut - let's face it, each phone is like another small computer on your desk which remains on all the time - but fixed-mobile convergence may cut electricity bills if it cuts number of devices.
That's just one side of the equation. IP also supports more effective flexible working and more use of video conferencing (although neither of these is exclusive to IP). Doing more from home or local office space could mean fewer commuting miles, saving the individual and the business money. Hooray for new age communications technology!
But let's not pretend telecommunications is the panacea. Video has not taken off except for certain limited uses. To date it has been an additional way to communicate, not a replacement for all meetings requiring travel. Technology that does not recognise what it means to be human is resisted, even when it's done for the greater good of man-kind...
Inevitably the solution to a warming world will mean a change of design priorities. When tech companies develop new products we might focus on effective, rich-experience solutions, with a thought for new power efficiencies. Can desk phones be powered down when no one is logged-on (or, like motion-driven light switches, when no one is in the room)? Could they use solar-power to charge batteries that let the phones tick over at night? Should soft-clients be encouraged, to reduce number of power-hungry devices? When we sell an "economy' phone", should it also be our most power efficient?
According to Stern, global warming's impacts include melting glaciers, flooding, declining crop yields, migration and over-crowding, hunger, disease and death. ICT is both contributing cause and part of the solution. The right moral position is already the essential business policy. Let's start the trek to the high-ground, and before the water is lapping at our feet.
So what's so wrong with CLOSED communications?
One question the analysts are asking about Siemens' open communications positioning is: "So, really, what's so wrong with CLOSED communications?"
The argument against Siemens' 'open' positioning goes like this. We've been living with proprietary ICT systems for years. Microsoft Office is a proprietary software suite and is massively popular. SAP doesn't go out of its way to integrate with other ERP systems. Some of Siemens' telephony rivals provide IP-only solutions, they don't even try to accommodate previous technologies or other systems. So where's the clear advantage of an open model, even in communications? As it is an important challenge to answer, the thing to ask is, what do customers really want from communications anyway?
Yes, ultimately customers want to make lots of profit. But to support them in doing this, customers expect communications to cost-effectively knit together the organisation's many and varied functions into excellent processes. (How many things can you do in your organisation without picking up the telephone or speaking to someone?) More than this, customers want communications to be flexible enough to change when required.
There are two necessary conditions to achieve these two fairly simple objectives. The first is for the organisation to have 'best, no compromise' ways of achieving individual, isolated activities. The second necessary condition is for the enterprise to be able to combine and integrate these activities in a way that creates excellent business value.
In order to have 'no compromise' activities, the organisation needs to buy the best ICT solutions to support a specific need. To use an example, the enterprise needs to buy the word processing application with the best, easiest-to-use functionality.
In order to be able to integrate these point applications excellently, it needs to buy solutions that work well together... But of course this is where the problem starts. Closed, proprietary point solutions don't integrate well (by definition). Knowing this, most organisations then compromise. Instead of buying the best word processing package, and the best spreadsheet, and so on, they buy the best Office Suite: a group of applications designed to work well together.
Let's bring it closer to home. Customers buy a communications system not just for its functionality, but because they believe that it integrates well with other software (e.g. it is part of an application suite). They may also believe that the solution integrates better with underlying network infrastructure from the same company. Call this a 'solutions suite': it's not just about applications, but how everything integrates to create value.
The solution suite, any closed solution suite cannot cover all activities needed by a process. At the edge, the solution again needs to integrate with someone else's systems.
To summarise, with a closed communications system, even though the customer has compromised on ultimate quality of isolated applications, has still not been able to avoid expensive customisation. It still needs to join up the silos. Analyst groups should agree on this: most say that integration is high up on spending priorities.
So how is Open Communications different? It's a concept based on standards, increasing the likelihood of being able to integrate. That's a core part of its appeal. So why haven't we all gone 'open source'? Aren't such collaborative systems the acme of openness?
The answer is that open sourced, standards-based applications are function-poor: the sponsors make their money from adding functionality at the top end and of course charging for integration and associated professional services.
The dream for customers, surely, is to get a thought-through, no-compromise, full function solution that is based deep-down on standards (such as SOA), to make integration easy. And they want something that's flexible: that will integrate new activities and functions and applications as they come along in the future. That's not open source and is definitely not closed, proprietary. That's Open Communications.