Data centres and the green cloud

Over at the BPM Blueworks blog, Mihnea Galeteanu has posted about mitigating a data centre’s negative effects on the environment. Although data centres do use massive amounts of energy, their consolidation and management practices actually make them more efficient than a number of disparate servers providing the same services. Without the huge amounts of processing power data centres provide, we would be without many of the new technologies we have today including grid computing, cloud applications and complex web applications like the Google search engine.  Read the whole thing here.

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*Image used with permission from Mihnea Galeteanu.

Innovation through sustainability in open ecosystems

In this month’s (September 2009) Harvard Business Review Ram Nidumolu, C. Prahalad and M. Rangaswami take on the topic of sustainability as a driver of innovation. They identified  five stages of sustainable development organizations progress through. The five stages are:

1. Viewing compliance as opportunity
2. Making value chains sustainable
3. Designing sustainable products and services
4. Developing new business models
5. Creating next-practice platforms

I found the article very interesting. They state that not only are organizations able to meet and exceed environmental regulations, green innovators use sustainability as a way to find new markets and increase the profits in their current markets. Open ecosystems have an opportunity that if exploited could lead to new levels of sustainability, growth and stability. In this post I am going to examine the five stages as they relate to open ecosystems. Read the rest of this entry »