VentureBeat has an article by Drew Clark, Director of Strategy and co-founder of IBM's Venture Capital group. This is consistent with another presentation I saw from IBM on Green Technology. Here are some of the key points.
Green Datacenter. The “greening” of the datacenter will continue to be a top priority for corporations as the cost of simply powering the center begins to exceed the cost of the servers and devices in it. Key drivers to help reduce the overall carbon footprint and run more efficient centers will include intelligent sensors and advanced analytics to monitor and improve equipment utilization to reduce downtime and provide comprehensive operational visibility. Green datacenters are also increasingly becoming part of corporate social responsibility campaigns, so expect increased focus here.
Beyond investment in alternative energy, there will be a great demand for technologies that allow energy consumers (businesses and homeowners) and producers (utilities) to monitor, manage, distribute and use energy more efficiently. Look for more investment in companies in the areas of energy efficiency, advanced water management, intelligent utility networks, energy caching and storage, and demand-side conservation and smart metering tools.
Meanwhile, leading-edge companies are evaluating Web-based platforms that provide service-based access to a range of infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes. As these Google-like “clouds” evolve and mature over the next 2-3 years, we’ll begin to see them strongly influence the next phase in enterprise datacenter architecture.
In addition, one of the greenest uses of data centers will be through mobile phones which have small resource usage are always on, connected to data center web services.
Industry analysts are predicting that by 2010 there will be 1 billion people (almost a third of the world’s population) accessing the Web via a mobile screen. This is obviously game-changing. The social-community-based approach of Web 2.0 will increasingly become part of this mobile landscape in 2008.