IBM forms alliance with metering and automation partners

03 July 2009

Green Sigma Coalition focuses on solutions for energy, water, waste, and greenhouse gas management.

IBM has created an industry alliance, which it calls the Green Sigma Coalition, with key suppliers of metering, monitoring, automation, data communications and software technologies to provide smart solutions for energy, water, waste, and greenhouse gas management.

Charter members of the Green Sigma Coalition are Johnson Controls, Honeywell Building Solutions, ABB, Eaton, ESS, Cisco, Siemens Building Technologies Division, Schneider Electric, and SAP. The coalition members will work with IBM to integrate their products and services with IBM`s Green Sigma solution.

The goal behind this coalition is to allow companies using combined solutions from the coalition’s partners to better understand energy and water usage, waste, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across their business operations and make changes to improve efficiency, reduce consumption and waste, and lower environmental impact.

Green Sigma is an IBM solution that applies Lean Six Sigma principles and practices to energy, water, waste and GHG emissions throughout a company`s operations—transportation systems, data centers and IT systems, manufacturing and distribution centres, office facilities, retail space, research and development sites. It combines real-time metering and monitoring with advanced analytics and dashboards that allow clients to make better decisions that improve efficiency, lower costs and reduce environmental impact.

IBM announced the Green Sigma Coalition at its “Green and Beyond Summit” for industry leaders in San Francisco. At the event, IBM announced several new or expanded relationships with key industry leaders, including:
* IBM and Cisco have integrated IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management and the Cisco EnergyWise energy management solution. The new combined solution broadens the range of power consumption information and energy optimisation policies that can be managed by IBM Energy Management solutions to help organisations discover, optimise, and report energy usage within their data centre and business infrastructure.
* IBM and Honeywell will integrate Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management with Honeywell`s EBI and Tridium offerings.

– Edited by David Greenfield, editorial director