Optimising IT in an Environmentally Sensitive World
Steve Bowden,Chief Technology Officer Green Computing, IBM
Steve Bowden is Chief Technology Officer for Green Computing at IBM, with a remit to promote sustainable, cost-effective, energy-efficient IT across Northern Europe.
Drawing on his 20 years’ industry experience as a Senior Consultant for IBM, Steve combines sharp insight into the business challenges that drive IT with a deep understanding of the underlying technology. In the course of his work worldwide with companies of all sizes and across all industry verticals – from financial services to local government – Steve has tackled every aspect of the IT infrastructure, always with a clear focus on how to make it produce tangible business benefits.
Changing business pressures over the years have seen the pendulum swing from centralised to distributed infrastructure, fuelled in part by the availability of low-cost x86 servers. As the number of machines in the data centre continues to grow rapidly, centralisation is once again becoming a valid strategy for some parts of the infrastructure. Many of the organisations Steve works with have gone down the road of physical consolidation and are already pushing ahead rapidly with server virtualization.
As energy costs continue to rise far faster than inflation, and as the media spotlight on corporate carbon footprint intensifies, pressure is growing on the IT function to tighten its belt and clean up its act. Steve and his colleagues in the global IBM Green Computing organisation are helping corporate IT departments to understand how they can both improve service to the business and move to a leaner, greener infrastructure.
In his role as CTO for Green Computing, Steve continues to develop new ideas about the optimal use of technology for business, and remains in close contact with businesses around the world, gaining valuable feedback for product development initiatives within IBM. He believes firmly that Green Computing should be viewed not as an unpleasant obligation but rather as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements in the efficiency, quality and cost-effectiveness of the IT infrastructure, while simultaneously enabling faster time-to-market for new products and services.
Session Synopsis
Revenue, Margin , Competitive pressures, global economic downturns and challenges to save the planet are impacting every business. But how do you balance those to deliver an IT infrastructure that meets all those needs?
Do you want to make IT work for your business? Do you view IT as a cost centre or a tool to help the business deliver results? Want to know how you can start to make IT work for you?. This session will discuss IBM's vision for an evolutionary model that helps to:
- Reset the economics of IT
- Dramatically improve operational efficiency and address concerns over rising energy costs and impact
- Reduce and control rising operational and capital costs
- Improve provisioning speed and data center security and resiliency—at any scale
- Allow the business to be highly responsive to any user need
- Align technology and business: giving your business the freedom and the tools you need to innovate and stay ahead of the competition
Session date: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 - 9:45am
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