Intelligence For A Green Future

Are you interested in learning how to simplify energy management? Discover the benefits of adding intelligence to infrastructures such as in-building lighting, in-building wireless coverage, cellular base-station networks, and broadband networks.

Earlier this month, I ventured down to Bogota, Colombia as an invited speaker at BICSI Andinos 2012. Bogota, the capital city, is nestled between two forks of the northern Andes mountains at an altitude of 8600 feet. Both the climate and the people are warm and inviting, and my CommScope friends and hosts ensured that I tasted the rich diversity of local cuisine and culture.

But what really struck me about the city and the region was the amount of plant-life visible wherever you look—certainly, the mountains which dominate every horizon, but also within the city, both in dedicated parks and around most buildings. Perhaps it’s the fact that temperatures there rarely go above 70F (21C) or below 45F (7C), so just about everything (even the concrete in places) is naturally green.

When the topic of my Bogota BICSI presentation—“Intelligence for a Green Future”—was originally proposed to me, I immediately gravitated to it, as I knew that I could go into great detail on our recent integration of iPatch Intelligent Infrastructure with Cisco’s EnergyWise platform to conserve energy by automatically powering down IT equipment within a building, simultaneously saving money and saving the planet. This sentence alone would nearly fill my 1-hour time slot. But as I considered the subject in a broader context, I was forced to look at a bigger, greener picture. You are likely reading this now on some sort of mobile device, and it is the proliferation of these devices (50 billion globally by 2020) that many consider to be at the expense of the environment due to increased CO2 emissions created during their manufacture and ongoing energy use.

So after some thought and research, I was able to quantify the benefits of adding intelligence to other infrastructure as well such as in-building lighting, in-building wireless coverage, cellular base-station networks, and broadband networks – all applications where CommScope can bring technology and intelligence to bear. And the net result of adding real intelligence to IT networks and devices? A huge overall reduction in greenhouse gases by the year 2020 (source: “Smart 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy”).

So we are truly helping green cities like Bogota stay green, and saving our customers some green in the process. I feel good.

Want to learn more? See us June 10-14 at Cisco Live! in San Diego (booth #2776) in the EnergyWise and UPOE Pavilion to learn how to simplify energy management.