The deal basically unified BT’s Global Video Exchange services with Orange Business Services Telepresence Community. The operators will also issue a directory for its customers so they know who and how to contact firms on the other network.

BT and Orange are the latest operators to offer inter-operator TelePresence services. Both are already interconnected to Tata’s global TelePresence portfolio, which includes enterprise users on its own network, that of partners such as Telefornica, as well as some three dozen public rooms with TelePresence systems. BT is also connected to AT&T’s TelePresence network.

As part of its “conquests 2015″ plan, Orange Business has identified cloud computing, M2M, as well as video conferencing, as “priority areas for growth.” What’s interesting is that all of these areas are part green ICT, and represent technologies that should help drive efficiencies in the enterprise, cities, and between people.

Of course, the operator didn’t mentioned the green element as such, but it is cool that a major international telco now sees much of its growth potential in green services.

Here are what Orange Business is setting out to do:

• generating 500 million euros in cloud computing by 2015 by accelerating its developments focusing on four areas: cloud-ready networks, “as a service” infrastructures, “as a service” collaborative solutions and communications, and application stores.
• selling 10 million SIM cards by 2015 on the M2M market (or Internet of Things), capitalizing on: the development of services beyond connectivity, its dedicated international expertise center in Brussels and its role as the driving force for the standardization of the market.
• becoming number 1 for videoconferencing in France and one of the top three worldwide. The guiding principles include: interoperability of terminals and networks, development of managed and hosted solutions, as well as simplification of uses through user support.

Oh, the fourth objective in the list is to generate 1 billion euros in revenues from emerging countries.

A pilot program conducted at Microsoft’s Seattle campus has shown that intelligent building solutions using cloud-based software can be achieved with 10% of a building’s annual energy expenditure, offering a ROI period of 18 months.

The program was implemented in 13 of Microsoft’s 118 buildings on its campus, and carried out by Microsoft, Accenture and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
According to a white paper published by the firms on the results of the pilot, the system added an analytical layer on top of existing building management systems, to improve efficiencies in fault detection, alarm management, and energy management. The system works by allowing building engineers to quickly identify problems and potential glitches instead of being reactive, while allow them to optimise performance and define usage and load parameters over time.

The result is savings in the range of several million US dollars, the white paper said.

“What we learned from the pilot program (and which is detailed in the paper) is that we at Microsoft (and by extension, many organizations with real estate portfolios) don’t need to undertake capital-intensive retrofits to cut building energy costs,” wrote Josh Henretig in the official blog from Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability team. “Instead, we saw buildings become dramatically more efficient by introducing software to harness and utilize the building systems already in use. By integrating powerful analytics that add intelligence to existing building infrastructure, our buildings got smarter, more efficient and less costly to operate.”

Excepts from the paper:

In its initial stage, the program addresses energy consumption and cost in three specific ways:

• Fault detection and diagnosis to enable timely and targeted interventions in cases of faulty or under-performing building equipment.

• Alarm management to prioritize the many notifications generated by existing building systems and point engineers to the most impactful issues.

• Energy management through systematic tracking and optimization of building energy consumption and performance over time, while changing the behavior of building occupants with visual dashboards and benchmarks.

How can others replicate this:

Microsoft’s pilot program demonstrates how corporate real estate organizations can collaborate successfully with IT, putting smart building technology to use in cutting costs and securing environmental benefits. Its experience has helped define a set of key design principles that can be used in any such rollout. These are outlined in more detail in this report, in summary they include:

• Identify, collect and aggregate relevant data: This involves setting up automated aggregation of building, weather, utility and organizational data from building systems and other sources to feed into the smart building solution. Cloud computing, combined with on-site building management technology, can provide a powerful platform to gather, store, exchange, and process diverse datasets in a secure and scalable way.

• Employ industry-leading analytics to identify savings: The core of the smart building solution is the analytics engine consisting of rules and algorithms that identify and prioritize interventions to maximize savings. Vendors differ in their approaches
and capabilities and should thus be evaluated thoroughly.

• Present results in a consumable and actionable form: The user experience needs to strike the right balance between ease of use and flexibility. Solutions need to improve
an engineer’s day-to-day productivity with better real-time information and access to data, while also providing a strong toolset for deeper analysis.

• Centralize monitoring operations: A centralized operations center can effectively monitor building conditions across a campus or multi-site portfolio and communicate directly with building engineers.

• Engage the organization: Greater awareness of energy use and benchmarks, displayed via dashboards on the intranet or in hallways, can encourage employees and business leaders to save energy, reducing overall demand.

• Avoid disruptive change: Existing building management systems do not need to be replaced. By deploying an analytics layer on top of these systems, prior investments can be significantly enhanced with minimal capital expenditure. Engineers can adopt new tools while still working directly with more familiar systems. Strong cross- organizational project management and a tailored change management approach are key to success.

The first ever ITU Green Standards Week, head in early September, held a particular emphasis on a globalised methodology for assessing the environmental impact of ICTs globally.

“ITU has been working with industry and government members aiming to achieve agreement on an internationally recognized set of methodologies to be approved by the end of the year. Included is a methodology which ICT companies can use to measure their own carbon footprint, as well as a way to estimate the considerable savings in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy that can be achieved in other sectors through the use of ICTs,” ITU said. “A single global methodology will give credibility to the various claims currently being made about the benefits of ICTs in addressing climate change and energy issues.”

Other topics discussed at the event include reducing e-waste and the use of submarine cables for climate change monitoring and disaster warning.

Green Standards Week, jointly organized by ITU and the Italian Ministry for Economic Development, and hosted by Telecom Italia, took place in Rome 5 to 9 September 2011. The event was also supported by Huawei, Research In Motion, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, VRM Italy and Microsoft. The goal was to raise awareness on the role of ICTs to promote environmental sustainability and in particular how standards can help to achieve this.

The body of the talks comprised three workshops: Methodologies for Environmental Impact Assessment of ICT, jointly organized with the European Commission; and Moving to a Green Economy through ICT Standards, jointly organized with Telecom Italia. The third workshop, Submarine Cables for Ocean/Climate Monitoring and Disaster Warning: Science, Engineering, Business and Law was organized with WMO and UNESCO and proposed the use of submarine communication cables for ocean and climate monitoring and disaster warning. For more information, see ITU’s Technology Watch report. Workshop participants called on ITU, UNESCO and WMO to establish and coordinate a joint task force composed of world renowned experts from science, engineering, business and law to intensify study on the use of submarine networks and to explore engineering and business potential in this realm.

According to Google, when compared to on-site email server installations, Gmail now offers significant energy, thus carbon, savings.

“We compared Gmail to the traditional enterprise email solutions it’s replaced for more than 4 million businesses. The results were clear: switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email,” the company said in a post on Google’s official blog. “This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centres that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.”

The comparison makes some general assumptions, such as the average number and type of servers deployed for different sized corporations, typical operating requirements, as well as the energy profiles of locally hosted server rooms and data centres.

The size of businesses are defined as follow:

Typical installations by these businesses are also assumed to include backup servers, redundant storage, and backup network links. The energy required for the passive infrastructures such as racks, UPS, cooling and so on, are also taken into account as PUE, or power usage effectiveness.

For the comparison, Google estimated that the average PUE for today’s data centres at 1.8 (medium business), with smaller business installations at 2.5, and larger businesses and bigger facilities given the ability to drive that down to 1.6.

Lastly, Google also highlights additional energy savings from cloud-based Gmail, including the fact it offers better overall resource utilisation because its pool of servers are used by multiple businesses, thus better provisioned for peak demand – as illustrated below:

On top of that, Google says that its infrastructure is also highly customised for efficiency, including specially designed servers for cloud operations, customised, high efficiency power suppliers, and custom-built software that “is designed to perform with maximum efficiency on the servers we develop without bloated additional features.”

All those factors now give Google’s infrastructure a PUE figure of 1.16.

“Optimizing the entire process of storing, hosting and serving email means that Gmail requires less than 250 mW per user,” Google said. “Over the course of a year, that’s just a bit more than 2 kWh of energy, or about $0.22 per user per year, representing significant savings over the locally hosted alternatives…”

Here’s what Google’s metrics look like in comparison to locally hosted systems:

Carbon savings

In terms of the amount of carbon emissions, the footprint of a Gmail user is about 1/80 of a user on a locally hosted system inside a small businesses, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s average emission intensity for locally-hosted email servers, the report said.

In actual numbers, a Gmail user will generate less than 1.23 kg of CO on an annual basis, compared to 4.1 kg per user for large businesses, 16.7 kg per user for medium businesses, and a whopping 103 kg per user for small business sites.

Needless to say, the same comparison can probably be applied to other cloud-based application delivery models. Obviously, Google’s impressive innovations on the hardware and infrastructure side give the company an additional edge, but many of benefits highlighted by the study, such as the efficiency benefits of scale in running data centres and higher utilisation rates as a result of shared resource pools, can be applied to any cloud environment.

In a blog post, Laura Ipsen, the general manager of the company’s smart grid business says that “for energy management in the home, we will transition our focus from creating premise energy management devices to using the network as the platform for supporting innovative applications and architectures that will improve our customers’ value proposition in the consumer energy management market.”

Cisco has previously developed home energy controllers that allow users to view and control their energy consumption. Despite being trialled by a number of Cisco’s utility partners, the high cost of these devices – several hundred US dollars – and the wide availability of other smart devices like smartphones and tablets, have led to low adoption of Cisco’s products.

As such, Cisco has decided to exit the Home Energy Controller initiative, a move made official as part of the company’s fiscal fourth quarter call. Cisco’s exit of home energy management follows the shutting down of two other home energy management solutions – Google’s PowerMeter and Microsoft’s Hohm – earlier this year.

“By driving the network as the platform, leveraging our broader Cisco product portfolio and partner ecosystem, and by incorporating lessons learned into our Connected Grid Architecture, we can enable active customer participation in markets, grid operations, and service innovations,” she wrote. “We can also drive open standards-based solutions and interoperability between existing products. This decision will enable Cisco to best serve its global customers by giving them the flexibility they need to be responsive to market transitions and consumer desires.”

The company will host a Global Energy Summit on Tuesday, September 27th with John Chambers and thought leaders from the Energy industry including: former California Public Utilities Commissioner Dian Grueneich, former Commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Suedeen Kelly, President and CEO of Digital Energy for GE Bob Gilligan, Secretary General of Elia Group Pierre Bernard, President and COO Global Energy for Itron Philip Mezey, and other guests.

“Our commitment to the industry remains strong and our vision for energy management and Smart Grid has not changed – to transform energy production, distribution, consumption and management using an end-to-end IP platform,” Ipsen said.

First unveiled in China a year ago, Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities concept aims to leverage intelligent network solutions to develop safer and more sustainable cities, according to Jane Wang, senior analyst at Ovum.

“The scale and pace of China’s urbanization, and the corresponding massive investment are driving Cisco’s increasing engagement with the Chinese market. China’s urban population will expand to the 1 billion mark by 2030. In 20 years, China’s cities will have added 350 million people – more than the entire population of the US today. By 2025, China will have 219 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants and 24 cities with more than 5 million people. The expansion of China’s cities will represent a huge challenge for local and national leaders. The growth will mean major pressure points for many cities, including the challenge of managing these expanding populations, securing sufficient public funding for the provision of social services, and dealing with demand and supply pressures on land, energy, water, and the environment,” Wang wrote in a research note.

“As a result, many city governments are increasingly aware of the urgency to embrace the “smart” approach as a way to make cities more sustainable and better places in which to live. This represents a significant opportunity for Cisco. Its “Smart+Connected Communities” approach includes solutions such as e-health, smart transport, smart education, and telepresence that can help governments to address these growing challenges.”

According to Wang, Cisco has an early mover advantage in China because its products and brand are widely used and accepted by many Chinese organisations, leading to a large mindshare in the government. Already, several Chinese cities, including Chongqing, Chengdu, Ningbo, Xi’an, and Wuxi, have announced partnerships with Cisco for their ‘smart city’ projects. As an example, Wang noted that Cisco is now setting up a Smart+Connected Communities Centre in Chongqing, where it will provide technical support and services, test Smart+Connected Communities solutions and products, and serve as a model for the network infrastructure required for the sustainable city development.

There are challengers for Cisco ahead, Wang added, highlighting the vast disparity in infrastructure development between different Chinese cities, making it difficult to have a single replicable approach. At the same time, financing such massive infrastructure projects, as well as its status as a foreign company, which doesn’t allow it to directly invest in government projects, can also slow progress, Wang noted.

According to Intel, the centres represent the next $30 million instalment of Intel’s recently announced 5-year, $100 million ISTC program to increase university research and accelerate innovation in a handful of key areas. As with previously announced ISTCs for visual computing and secure computing, the new centres encourage tighter collaboration between university thought leaders and Intel. To encourage further collaboration, the ISTCs use open IP models with results publically available through technical publications and open-source software releases, Intel said.

“These new ISTCs are expected to open amazing possibilities,” said Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer. “Imagine, for example, future cars equipped with embedded sensors and microprocessors to constantly collect and analyse traffic and weather data. That information could be shared and analysed in the cloud so that drivers could be provided with suggestions for quicker and safer routes.”

CLOUD
The new cloud computing centre combines top researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, Princeton University, and Intel. The researchers will explore technology that will have important future implications for the cloud, including built-in application optimization, more efficient and effective support of big data analytics on massive amounts of online data, and making the cloud more distributed and localized by extending cloud capabilities to the network edge and even to client devices.

The new embedded computing initiative will tap into the expertise of leading researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley and Intel.

EMBEDDED
The embedded computing centre will explore research to transform experiences in the home, car and retail environment of the future.

“With the growing popularity of mobile real-time and personalized technology, there is a corresponding rise in demand for specialized embedded computing systems to support a broad range of new applications — including many not yet envisioned,” Intel said. “A key area of research is to make it easier for these everyday devices to continuously collect, analyse and act on useful data from both sensors and online databases in a way that is timely, scalable and reliable. For example, in cars, this data could be used to customize in-vehicle entertainment options when specific passengers are recognized, and provide them better routing, retail, dining, and entertainment recommendations while on-the-road.”

NEW ISTCs
Meanwhile, Intel says that it is expanding the ISTC program into a new phase by openly inviting researchers from across the US academic community to submit information to be considered in the process to define additional ISTCs. “Principal investigators may submit a two page abstract outlining a potential topic and research scope for consideration by Intel Labs,” Intel said.

According to the operators, the network will be upgradable in the future and enable multiple applications on a unified platform. While Cable&Wireless Worldwide will provide the fixed infrastructure, Silver Spring will provide its secure IPv6-based Radio Frequency network infrastructure, software, and services.

The idea is to create an end-to-end solution for smart grids and smart meters, that will not only allow Distributed Network Operators to put intelligence into various parts of the electricity grid, but also facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid.

Matt Key, Managing Director of Enterprise at C&W Worldwide, comments, “This collaboration with Silver Spring will enable energy suppliers, and the UK as a whole, to extract value from the intelligence embedded in the smart grid as additional applications are brought on-line. It will also help DNOs to serve their regulatory mandates and to extend the life of their existing infrastructure.”

The trial will involve “hundreds of employees of regional utilities,” who will drive leased Chevrolet Volts as their everyday vehicles during the third quarter. Based on OnStar’s Advanced Telematics Operations Management System (ATOMS), utilities will be able gather data on when and where the vehicles are charged, as well as manage the charging of the vehicles.

The idea, according to GM, is to allow utilities to offer managed services, like a similar service offered for air-conditioners. With air-conditioners, customers opt in to allow the utility to stop and start their air-conditioners during peak demand hours. This allows the utility to load balance the demand while saving the consumer money.

The electric vehicle trial will run on the same concept, with utilities now getting the data for the car from consumers who opt in to the service. The OnStar system will provide the utility with overall charge levels and charging history by time and location of the vehicle. This will give the utility better insight for forecasting demand, setting rates and determining the best location for charging infrastructure.

The second level of the service is akin to the air-conditioning service, and will involve consumers opting in to allow utilities to actually manage their EV’s charging. The utility can then reduce peak loads by offering discounts or other incentives to encourage drivers to charge their EVs when overall electricity demand is lowest, typically in the early morning hours.

Press release: General Motors to Launch First Real-World Smart Grid Pilot.