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1. IBM + Sun = Good, or Bad, for Green?
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2. Green:Net VC Panel: From Dotcom to Greenboom
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3. Green:Net: The Green Web Effect
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4. Green:Net Keynote: IT Solutions for a Low-carbon Economy
IBM + Sun = Good, or Bad, for Green?
Celeste LeCompte - Big Green
Ever since the Wall Street Journal reported last week that IBM was in talks to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion in cash, the tech media has tried to dissect every potential reason for — and outcome of — such a deal. But little mention has been made as to how it could affect the two companies’ green initiatives. IBM and Sun both have jumped into the green IT fray over the last few years, albeit from different angles. So would a combined company double their efforts in the world of green IT, or halve them?
As Stacey has pointed out over at GigaOM, there’s a lot of potential for synergy between IBM and Sun’s cloud computing offerings, and the combined company would likely offer a robust enough array to help enterprise customers migrate to the cloud. That could be good news for Sun’s Eco Responsibility initiative, launched in December 2005. At the outset, the campaign was part of an effort to bolster sales of Sun’s new energy-efficient chips and server products with a “green” message, but Sun also made an effort to tie the campaign into its overall approach to computing. Because cloud computing and green IT have become so closely linked in many minds, an acquisition of Sun by IBM likely wouldn't put a damper on Sun’s Eco Responsibility initiatives (though I’d be surprised to see IBM keep the “Eco Responsibility” branding).
By acquiring Sun, IBM would also gain control of Java, Sun’s biggest brand success, if not its largest commercial one. (Sun may have swapped its SUNW stock ticker for JAVA in 2007, but in 2008, the company earned just $200 million from Java on total revenues of $13.8 billion.) AMR Research suggests that Java, not Sun’s server and storage products, could be the biggest boon for IBM — including for IBM’s recently launched “Smarter Planet” campaign, which aims to use information technology for improving the efficiency and sustainability of diverse industries, from food and oil to water and electricity. Because Java, a pervasive and powerful development platform, is already an important part of many of IBM’s software and services offerings, bringing it in-house could give IBM a serious advantage over other enterprise software vendors — including those (like SAP) seeking to make their own sustainability management software plays.
Earlier this year, I spoke at length with Drew Clark, director of strategy for the IBM Venture Capital Group, about IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. He stressed the growing importance of the mobile handset; according to Clark, mobile access to the data generated from smart systems will play a key role in improving the effectiveness of such initiatives, particularly in the consumer space. In order to bring smarter tools to consumers — whether they be smart home energy management systems, smarter irrigation systems, or smart parking and traffic tools — Clark said making information accessible and actionable on a mobile device will be necessary. “The new IT platform has evolved from the desktop to the mobile handset,” he said.
For Clark, the mobile platform that can run such systems has to be three things: easy to use, easy to develop for (preferably with a developer community behind it), and “as open as you can be,” he said. “That’s the magic formula.” By acquiring Java, Sun would add just such a platform to its portfolio of tools. (Sun’s Java ME is supported on Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry handsets — as well as unofficially on Android.)
However, that’s just my take. Unsurprisingly, neither Sun nor IBM would comment on the potential impact of such a deal on their green initiatives.
Green:Net VC Panel: From Dotcom to Greenboom
Stacey Higginbotham - Startups
Paul Holland, general partner with Foundation Capital, also warned that the stimulus package won’t have a lot of money for startups because it’s designed to generate jobs today rather than in the distant future. Steve Westly, managing partner at The Westly Group and an investor in Tesla, which is seeking government subsidies, argued that the government has a role to play in cleantech, not just for subsidies but also for regulatory mandates and standards.
Westly also pitched Tesla, saying the company had revenue of $14 million last year and was on track to bring in $140 million in the coming year. Ironically, Westly also said he was unwilling to make investments in cleantech startups that will require a lot of capital and take a lot of time to reach an exit. Tesla seems to contradict this, but Westly’s rationale that the returns on cleantech deals will be lower than the thousandfold returns on web and IT-related deals of the last boom makes sense.
Westly was the optimist of the panel, predicting that the market for initial public offerings will open up in the first quarter of 2010 and “perhaps sooner.” Mark Zanoli, managing director at J.P. Morgan, was less optimistic. He pointed out that the reason there are no solar IPO deals today is mostly because the startups need to have manufacturing at scale and gross margins that investors will like. Most simply aren’t big enough. Added to this, the customers of solar panels need money to buy the solar panels that they don’t have today. Zanoli anticipates that in the coming months these solar startups will face a race between when the solar companies get their market and when their money runs out.
Green:Net: The Green Web Effect
Liz Gannes - Big Green
The green movement is bigger than your crunchy granola friends from college. And the web is a tool to meet, inform and motivate people who want to make the world a better place. At our afternoon web panel at Green:Net, participants shared captivating observations about how their audiences and members are taking green action online.
Moderator Alexis Madrigal of Wired.com started the panel on a rich vein: “The Internet can spread knowledge, but can it get people to do something?” The panelists replied that that they’ve found different emerging interest groups that can be motivated in different ways.
Moms seem to be one of the largest and most actionable groups on the web from a green perspective, said panelists from startups Carbonrally, GoodGuide and Zerofootprint. They care deeply about health risks for their kids. The best way to resonate with moms is to talk in terms of toxics, not environmental impact, especially considering widespread greenwashed marketing, said GoodGuide CEO Dara O’Rourke, whose company offers information on products’ health and social impact.
Erin Carlson, the director of Yahoo for Good, had more nuance to offer after looking at what green content attracts an audience on Yahoo properties like its main page and portals for cars and jobs. She split out three main profiles within that audience:
- Deep green: 23 percent of audience. Skewed female, metropolitan, in it for the long term
- Trendy: 24 percent. Green to look cool. Skews younger and multicultural. Responds to messages about “everybody’s doing it.”
- Practical: 13 percent. Older, in more rural areas. Doing more, saving time.
“People do not respond to doom and gloom,” said Carlson. “They do not respond to celebrities talking about green.” She described Yahoo’s strategy of grabbing people with a sexy headline — say, a world naked bikeride — that leads to an article about alternative transportation.
Carbonrally founder and president Jason Karas described an emerging demographic to his site’s highly interactive personal impact competitions — young people. After a promotion from Seventeen magazine, some 6,000 young girls have taken to the site to start a social movement. They are rabid users of social web tools, with far more messages and interactions on the site than their older counterparts.
There are plenty of opportunities to put understanding green-leaning users to work. Carlson used her observations of the relatively passive audience at Yahoo to suggest that more interactive products like Zerofootprint and Carbonrally might benefit from not using the term “carbon” quite so prominently. She said, for example, that as a rock climber she’d personally be more motivated by information that was described in terms of impact on rock climbing destinations rather than pounds of carbon.
Green:Net Keynote: IT Solutions for a Low-carbon Economy
Stacey Higginbotham - Carbon Markets
He outlined how Microsoft is empowering its employees to think about environmental impact: An employee-suggested switch from Styrofoam cups to compostable dishware cut Microsoft’s annual waste stream by 50 percent. On the IT side, Bernard said Microsoft is focusing on the 2 percent of the world’s energy consumed by data centers and bringing Moore’s Law to them. Utilization of servers is one aspect of that, as well as offering IT professionals metrics to measure their progress with energy consumption. Bernard said only 15 percent of IT staffers have even seen their utility bills.
Taking the role of IT beyond data centers and into building management will also improve efficiency of buildings by about 30 percent Bernard said. About 37 percent of greenhouse gases come from buildings — something the Obama administration is hoping to address. In addition to bigger role for IT, Bernard talked about Microsoft’s efforts to help scientists gather data from a wide variety of sources and mash that up into a usable set of numbers so scientists can study larger issues, such as the widescale affects of climate change on water systems.
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