Amazon Web Services has upped its enterprise credibility again, this time via a partnership with SAP that has certified certain SAP applications to run in production environments on the AWS cloud. With the designation, AWS joins a select group of enterprise-focused cloud providers. Read more »
Is the Foursquare, Twitter, or Mint.com of real time energy data just around the corner? GridGlo, a year-old startup working on combining energy data with other big data sets, launched on Wednesday, with a plan to sell apps around energy info to utilities. Read more »
The smart grid industry’s focus is now shifting to the true purpose of the smart grid movement: applications that will improve the efficiency, reliability and versatility of the electric grid. This report analyzes six key smart grid application trends that will help shape the industry landscape in the years to come: distribution automation, data analytics, demand response, carbon management, home energy management and electric vehicles. The applications that prevail in this new arena will define the smart grid experience for industrial, commercial and residential customers. Along the way, new business opportunities that arise from these applications will become available for the providers of software, systems, devices and services, and enhance customer awareness and control of energy consumption. Companies mentioned in this report include Echelon, Google, EnerNOC, ZigBee and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Thomas Siebel unveiled customers and features of his stealthy carbon software company C3 at the Fortune Brainstorm Green event. It’s not a software product, said Siebel, it’s a $150 million effort that will take a decade to build and is more like a division of SAP. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With enterprise data volumes growing, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. Using cloud-computing technologies, organizations are experimenting with distributed data stores, cloud compute capacity for data analytics, hosted data integration and even operational databases in the cloud. Hadoop/MapReduce, meanwhile, has moved past test and development stage to become a viable extension or alternative to traditional relational databases. Though the space is not without its obstacles, including plenty of privacy concerns, there are numerous sales-growth opportunities and new business models finally surfacing in 2011. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The argument against electric cars is that if the grid is powered by mostly coal, then so are our cars. But the long term goal is to move the grid over to clean power. However, here’s the bumpy road ahead for these transitions. Read more »
What’s fascinating to hear how a company that deals in analytics and mobile-device management software approaches these issues within its own walls. For SAP, that means embracing the iPad as a business tool, dumping CRM databases in-memory and tracking carbon emissions down to the molecule. Read more »
One of the obstacles to cloud adoption is that most organizations have infrastructure in place, meaning they can’t just build best-of-breed cloud environments. This was reinforced via an on-point post from James Urquhart, a survey of satisfied cloud users and a round of funding for Riptano. Read more »
Smart grid trade show GridWeek is wrapping up in Washington D.C., but the hard work of integrating all the hardware and software on display has just begun. Read more »
Eager to get over the embarrassing departure of former chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, who joined Oracle and was subsequently sued by his former employer, Hewlett-Packard has named a new CEO — but the response to its choice has been underwhelming at best. Read more »
Eager to get over the embarrassing departure of former chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, who joined Oracle and was subsequently sued by his former employer, Hewlett-Packard has named a new CEO — but the response to its choice has been underwhelming at best. Read more »
IBM has been talking for a long time about linking smart building technology and enterprise-wide sustainability. Late Thursday, it unleashed a slew of new products, services and partnerships aimed at cementing that role. Read more »
Social discovery engine StumbleUpon has released a new iPhone application, bringing the product’s web functionality to mobile devices.For those of you unaware, StumbleUpon, which was established in 2001, is a service which allows its users to browse the web in a casual and possibly addictive way. Read more »
In the second quarter of 2010, greentech startups scored record venture capital and increased spending despite a weak economy. Solar power retained its lead in greentech venture financing, while global investment for clean energy asset financing fell. China, meanwhile, underscored its rising might in the greentech industry, raising billions of dollars in green energy financing. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The smart grid is undergoing a massive shift as utilities move from the existing world of proprietary, standards-based legacy technologies towards an architecture that will require a much greater degree of interoperability and use of open standards. Despite barriers that currently prevent widespread adoption, the fact that it is possible at all to apply open source models is a testament to how far the utility industry has come in the past few years. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Apple, being the savvy company that it is, has positioned itself well to capitalize on IT departments looking to make a change. Some of the largest organizations in the world are taking another look at Apple products, and with good reason. Read more »
More sustainability software services have emerged in recent years than online dating sites, but the next trend for these companies is to turn to next-generation analytics tools to manage the massive of influx of real-time data emerging around ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
SAP says it is buying Sybase for $5.8 billion or roughly $65 a share. The deal highlights the growing importance of the mobile Internet & how smartphones are becoming the all important remote terminals of today’s modern enterprise, in the process supplanting the PCs. Read more »
Every 15 years or so, the IT world undergoes a tectonic shift. Technological forces collide and grind against one another, creating an upheaval that leaves the landscape irrevocably changed. The latest such shift is currently underway: the transition to computing as a service, also known as ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With the growing recognition that global warming demands a business response, many companies are budgeting for climate-change plans. These plans aim to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across a wide range of activities, including procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, retailing, IT, waste disposal, and regulatory compliance. In drawing up and implementing these plans, though, businesses have made an unexpected discovery: The shift to greener operations creates competitive advantages by cutting costs, preparing for regulation of carbon emissions and presenting an attractively green ethos to the market. Sustainable business, it turns out, is good business.
To help implement their plans, companies can choose from a variety of enterprise sustainability software, also known as carbon management software, delivered via a Web browser in the form of Software as a Service. These systems collect resource-consumption data distributed geographically and functionally across the enterprise including electricity metering, transportation fuel costs and emissions from manufacturing and production facilities. The objective is to bring this data into one place where it can be examined and analyzed comprehensively.
Sustainability software covers three broad areas. One category is aimed at IT and helps manage energy consumption in data centers. A second category monitors and analyzes the flow of electricity in smart-grid installations. The third helps enterprises manage resources, emissions and waste. It collects data and offers visualization tools. The most advanced systems offer sophisticated modeling capabilities, which can aid greatly in formulating and implementing strategies for reducing an enterprise’s environmental footprint.
This third category is the subject of this report. While the green IT and smart-grid categories are relatively mature, the enterprise market is still taking shape. Moreover, this area has potential to become the largest by far. While the traditional market for sustainability software consists of Fortune 500 companies, smaller operations are beginning to recognize the benefits. Sustainability software will become attractive to businesses of all sizes and sectors as industries develop standards for tracking, evaluating, and reporting greenhouse gas emissions and as government regulations spur trade in carbon credits and environmental labeling of consumer products.
This report surveys the history of enterprise sustainability software systems, their capabilities, and how they’re being used in a variety of industries. It also offers recommendations for companies interested in using these tools. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Carbon pricing will become an important part of corporate accounting. But pricing aside, executives at today’s Green:Net conference said that carbon software can give companies a view into other inefficiencies in their operations. Read more »
During the next few years, plug-in hybrid and all electric vehicles will be mass-produced for the first time. The promise of reducing emissions, fuel consumption, and the cost of driving will prompt fleet operators and consumers to purchase more than 800,000 of these vehicles between 2010 and 2015, according to Pike Research’s forecasts. Keeping EVs charged and ready to go will require an infrastructure of equipment for vehicle charging and new IT management system for monitoring, analyzing, and controlling vehicle charging. This report looks at the opportunities for IT companies to solve a variety of challenges for utilities, automakers, consumers and others in the EV ecosystem. Includes market segment forecasts forcustomer information management, smart charging management and data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
What happens when you promise end-users a persistent connection to data, applications and services regardless of the device they’re using? Mobile cloud computing aims to deliver just such a promise. Mobile access to popular web-based services such as Facebook and Gmail, combined with next-generation smartphones like the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android devices, is driving broad adoption of mobile data. However, the center of economic gravity is shifting. Historically, access to the mobile network was the service. But as users have expanded the uses for those bits, what the user does in a given session becomes fundamental to how much the service provider can charge the user or a third party (e.g. an advertiser). Thus, it’s likely that the mobile, IT and MCC sectors will continue their current marriage of convenience to attack a rare convergence of both short-term and longer term opportunity. However, in the process of adapting to an Internet that’s becoming more global, mobile and web-based by the day, the mobile and IT industries will be forced into new ways of doing business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Retail behemoth Wal-Mart’s move to require disclosure of environmental data for all of its products helped tip the nascent carbon software market into the hot zone this summer, as companies prepped for a wave of new business from Wal-Mart’s suppliers. Today, less than two months after […] Read more »
When the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, tells tens of thousands of suppliers to start tracking and disclosing the environmental impact of their products, odds are they’re gonna listen. That means the companies selling carbon management software will be prepping for a wave of new customers looking […] Read more »
The big news in the world of sustainability this week is that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, will launch a labeling system to disclose the environmental impact of the products it sells and will be asking its more than 100,000 suppliers to start tracking things like […] Read more »
SAP, not exactly an early cloud adopter, thinks cloud computing will factor significantly into large-scale computing services, said SAP CTO Vishal Sikka in conversation with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco today. But that doesn’t mean enterprise services of the future […] Read more »
Carbon management software is like a sophomore on the cleantech campus: it’s been around for awhile, but it’s just now starting to get noticed by the senior class. This month SAP took over Clear Standards, a carbon management startup that raised $4 million last fall, and […] Read more »
Corporate social responsibility reports are often a company’s beachhead effort on sustainability, and most focus on relatively easy-to-achieve metrics, such as employee volunteerism rates, corporate giving and supplier diversity. Advocates say even this kind of transparency can spur companies to further action. That’s the logic behind […] Read more »
Companies building smart meters and the network infrastructure that allows them to communicate back to electric utilities generate most of the buzz around the emerging smart grid. But all that data sent from those smart meters has to be gathered, analyzed and acted upon by utilities, […] Read more »
This week, SAP took a surprisingly early step into the nascent carbon management market: it purchased the young (and relatively unknown in the broader software industry business) carbon management startup Clear Standards. The move is a game-changer for big software firms that have been eying the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Notable Observation: “In the context of software, the word Enterprise has now officially come to mean software that sucks. Enterprise Software hit the nadir of suckitude at the launch of Enjoy SAP. This is like the American Dental Association launching Enjoy Root Canal. SAP is certainly […] Read more »
