IBM Energy Management News: Toshiba Laptop Integration; Projects with Louvre, Air Force, LA Schools

by | Mar 7, 2012

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IBM announced an energy-management partnership with Toshiba, and projects to manage resources at the U.S. Air Force, Louvre Museum and Los Angeles Unified School District, at the company’s Pulse 2012 conference in Las Vegas this week.

Toshiba’s new line of enterprise laptop PCs will integrate IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager energy management software with Toshiba’s BIOS feature to allow IT managers to apply company’s specific policies for energy controls and security across PCs within an organization. Energy usage data is measured by the PC hardware and sent to IT staff, who can remotely put each group of PCs into specific power-saving modes or make peak-shift management changes as needed.

Security features include management server authentication, and optional blocks on file writing to external storage. Toshiba plans to sell the new lines of enterprise PCs by mid-2012.

IBM’s Tririga smarter buildings software will help the U.S. Air Force Office of the Civil Engineer gauge energy efficiency and automate the management of its worldwide physical infrastructure portfolio, including buildings, vehicles, runways and other infrastructure in 170 locations.

The portfolio covers more than 626 million square feet of real estate, 100 million square yards of airfield pavement and 10 million acres of land.

USAF said the software will help it remove redundant systems, make better decisions about resource management and predict scenarios before they impact service and safety. Using the software USAF plans to reduce operating costs and energy consumption through integrated workplace management, energy assessment tools, and building condition-based maintenance, IBM said.

IBM said that it is working with the Louvre Museum in Paris to preserve and protect its facilities and artwork. The 650,000-sq.-ft. museum is home to thousands of objects and artifacts, some dated to prehistory, requiring about 65,000 repairs and maintenance visits with hundreds of vendors per year, the company said.

IBM said that its Maximo Asset Management software is used by the museum’s staff to control corrective and preventative maintenance processes, as well as oversee the efficiency, real-time operation and management of the museum.

The software’s database helps staff visualize processes including the initial planning, cleaning, maintenance and disposal of room and facility systems such as air-conditioning, heating, elevators, lights for each room or gallery, and the locking system for more than 2,500 doors, IBM said.

IBM also announced a crowdsourcing mobile app project with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Faculty, staff, students or parents can send text messages or photos to report maintenance requests, such as leaky faucets, broken air conditioning units and other resource-wasting issues. Software from IBM business partners CitySourced and Esri then automatically shows staff where the problem is located, IBM said.

In the first eight months of the program’s implementation, the school district responded to more than 750 maintenance requests.

The school district is the second-largest in the country, with 700,000 students and more than 14,000 buildings over 710 square miles, and receives more than 300,000 maintenance service requests a year.

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