The Executive Newsletter of TheOfficialBoard

By Guy Hervier

The 90s saw incredible growth in Information Technologies. Few people paused to consider implications of parallel growth in electrical consumption.

The US Energy Star specification in 1992 was one of a few initiatives which regulated the efficiency of all this equipment.

In 2007, the American Congress published a report considered a milestone of the Green IT paradigm. It showed that the electrical consumption of all data centers in the US had doubled between 2000 and 2006, totaling 2% of the entire US electrical consumption and equalling the energy consumed by the world’s airline jets. And if nothing is done, it will double again by 2011 representing 100 billion of KWh or 7.4 billion dollars a year. In the prestigious Los Alamos labs, RoadRunner, the world’s fastest supercomputer eats 2.5 MWh a year, or as much as 500 US households. While computer performance efficiency has multiplied by a factor of 25 between 2000 and 2006, energy efficiency has progressed only by a factor of 8.

There are compelling reasons to think over the electrical consumption: 55 % is consumed by the data center infrastructure and 45 % by the computers; at the server level, 70 % of the energy is used by the power supply, memory, fans and storage leaving 30 % to the processors; within the processor, 80 % is consumed by processors in an idle state.

Welcome to wasteland: combining all these factors leads to a mere 3 % efficiency. Information Communication Technologies, which include all of our digital equipment ubiquitous in our daily lives, consumes 14% of the electrical production in a country like France. Even where they are in sleep mode, our systems are consuming energy.

However, even if data centers are consuming 2% of the electricity, they can help us optimize the other 98%. Information Communication Technology plays a major role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To name a few: innovative workplace organization such as telecommuting, videoconferencing and workgroup software, e-commerce, dematerialization of administration forms, smart grid, home automation, electric cars…

Some IT applications can have a spectacular effect on reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. IBM, for example, developed and deployed a toll system for cars in Stockholm that had cut emissions by 40% only 15 days after the system was implemented. Intelligent meters could lower power consumption by 10%, by sending information that electrical companies can use to better manage the grid, reducing useless production and losses.

While there is plenty of room for growth in the efficiency of technology, there are many opportunities for technology to increase our energy efficiency on a broader scale.

Guy Hervier, is Editor in Chief, ITRmanager, a leading publication for IT managers.

By Guy Hervier

In the evolution towards the Global Village, Social Networks are accelerating the process. Tools like Facebook are shrinking the world. I can be friends with my neighbor and a Hmong peasant from the Guizhou region, in southern China.

Is this sustainable in the long run? It is hard to tell because these tools stretch much farther than our ability to handle them directly. Anthropologists explain that it is impossible to maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people. Can Barack Obama keep a personal contact with his 6,000,000+ Facebook supporters or 2,000,000+ Twitter followers?

In a few years, how will we use Social Networks in our professional and personal lives? The Web is only 15 years old, Facebook 5 and Twitter 3. The quick evolution of these technologies makes things a lot more challenging. The GenY generation, who grew up with cell phones and the Internet has difficulties imagining – even understanding – that there was a life before all that.

We are still at the experimenting and tinkering stage:

1. For starters, these tools are spreading across all age groups; not long ago the only ones using them were 18-24 years old.

2. On the issue of privacy, the Canadian magazine Cyberpsychology & Behavior recently published the results of a study on the implications of the use of Facebook. The study shows that users who tracked the activities of their partner on the social network became more jealous and suspicious. There was a correlation between the amount of time spent and the level of distrust.

3. Political movements are using these tools a great deal. As everyone knows, social networks were a main part of Barack Obama’s Internet strategy in the presidential election. Today, the White House is increasing the use of such technologies.

4. In the business world, the employees who used these tools for their personal needs are beginning to use them for their professional life. And the difficulty of separating the professional from the personal is causing some problems. An article recently published by the Wall Street Journal showed that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) and other tax departments in the US are gathering some information from Social Networks to detect possible fiscal fraud.

5. Enterprise Software vendors - SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Open Text or Telligent to name a few – are integrating some social network functionality into their enterprise applications.

Guy Hervier, is Editor in Chief, ITRmanager, a leading publication for IT managers.

By Guy Hervier

After its first ten years, Microsoft had achieved revenue of 140 millions of dollars, compared to Google’s 21.7 billion dollars. Ten years after it started, Google had achieved revenue eighty times higher than that of Microsoft even after including a 3% annual inflation rate. Over the fiscal year 2008, 97 % of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, with 68 % from Google’s sites and 32 % from its partner sites.

It’s fair to call Google a tremendous success, one of the greatest stories in economic history. Google’s mission statement is noble but also disquieting, “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The comparison with Microsoft owning a de facto monopoly on the workstation becomes interesting, but Google is on a completely different scale. Google is building a monopoly on the access to information. Things can only get worse as Google continues with its astounding success.

The American administration gets involved. After IBM, AT&T, Microsoft and Intel, Google is now in the crosshairs of the American administration. Among the many ongoing Class-Action Lawsuits, the agreement between the Internet giant and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers is the most controversial. It states that Google will hand out 125 million dollars for the possibility of providing access on the Internet to works with expired copyright, those in the process of being printed, but possibly to works that aren’t available in paper format but that are still under copyright. The Department of Justice (DoJ) sent a formal request of information to Google, and to the editors that signed the agreement regarding the online publication of books.

Competition is one click away. Faced with the administration’s growing interest, Google has launched a “charm offensive”. One of Google’s strongest and often-repeated arguments is that competition to its search engine is only “one click away” and that all a competitor needs to take over is a new technology. That is what happened to AltaVista, Lycos, and others. And the new competition from Microsoft’s new search engine Bing gives Google some credit. Unlike what happens with other markets, Google’s users are not locked in, they consent to their fate.

Google Inside. Google is magnificent tool, with many side projects born from the minds of the company’s talented engineers. It is also a black box with its non-transparent ad auction system and profiling of private user data. According to Google, advertisers pay for what a click is worth. But as they have little visibility over what goes on, they pay what Google charges them. If Google is to avoid the current antitrust concerns, an option might be to provide more transparency to customers and regulators.

Guy Hervier, is Editor in Chief, ITRmanager, a leading publication for IT managers.

By Bruce Tonkin

Cloud computing, like – green power –  or – environmentally friendly -, is a marketing term that encapsulates a range of technical, business, and social developments associated with the Internet.

The – cloud – term has taken over the previous term the – world wide web -. It comes from the common use of a cloud on PowerPoint slides to represent the Internet – which is a complex series of interconnected computer networks. Cloud computing involves virtualised computers, capacity on demand, and the ability to use and pay for this capacity in short intervals of time.

30 years ago, most computer applications operated on large shared mainframe computers, and each application received a “time-slice” to perform operations. Users paid for computer time. For the past 10 years, the low cost of individual computers has meant that most applications today assume people have their own computer to use. The problem with this model is that these applications only use a small fraction of a computer’s processing capacity.

When companies such as Google and Amazon begin to use many computers to operate their applications – there are great inefficiencies in use of space, power, and cooling. Even the weight of all these computers is an issue when placed in multi-storey buildings. Virtualisation is a software technique that allows an application to operate as though it has its own dedicated computer, but is able to share the same computer with other applications.

Additional computing capacity can be accessed as an application’s requirements change, and multiple copies of the application can be operating on multiple computers. Organisations that operate large collections of computers for their applications are now able to sell their computing capacity to other organisations – and this has given rise to the term “cloud computing”.

Cloud computing is still evolving. Microsoft is now creating software applications which support development for either on a local computer, or computers spread around the world. Ideally a company no longer needs to own or operate its own computers, but can now focus on developing software that meets their needs and use the “cloud” to carry out the computing tasks.

The advantage of cloud computing is that companies may not have to invest as heavily in technology hardware. Harvesting computer energy more efficiently is cost effective and environmentally friendly.

The downside of cloud computing may involve data management. Customer information – is the most valuable resource for a company. In a pure cloud model this information can be sent anywhere in the Internet where there is spare capacity, and may be able to be accessed by other parties.

Also software services which operate solely in the cloud – e.g customer relationship software, human resources applications – mean that the data is never in the hands of a company, because users enter their data directly through the user interfaces of those applications. If a company switches to a different software application, how does it retrieve customer information which may be in a proprietary format that the company has direct access to. Data can also be “lost” – clouds do dissipate and blow away in the wind!

Pure cloud computing is ideal where the data itself is either not important or would be made public anyway. For example, recent social changes mean that many users are happy to share personal information via services such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

A common application of cloud computing, is the use of Web Hosting Companies such as Melbourne IT – where the computers and data storage associated with a particular company application are managed within defined geographic locations (in that case, within Australia and within known secure data centres).

The data can be retrieved at any time and shared with other applications. This combines the benefits of cloud computing and sharing expensive computing capacity on demand, with the security and peace of mind of knowing where the data is located, who can access it, and how to retrieve all the data when the needs of your business change.

Dr Bruce Tonkin, Chief Strategy Officer, Melbourne IT.  Melbourne IT is an Internet services company that provides domain name registration and management, website and software-as-a-service hosting, online brand management, and digital recording solutions.