Smart Products: Deploying Smarter Utilities

http://www.ibm.com/software/rational/innovate/
Al Zollar of IBM speaks about how products are now being made to be more intelligent, making it possible to have smart meters and smarter utilities. In addition, these smart products can provide insight into how to better manage the service that the products provide.

[Al Zollar, IBM]
I'm Al Zollar, General Manager of Tivoli software at IBM.

It's been clear that a lot of things are changing in the world around how products are being built, products are being made more intelligent because we're injecting microprocessor software stacks and communication conductivity into products of all classes and as we do that we make them very similar to the things that we've been managing in IT for many, many years and so now what we've done is brought together the capabilities to build smarter products from Rational with the capabilities to manage any type of technology enabled device with Tivoli so that you can have a true lifecycle view of what it takes to manage the service that the business depends on that involves these smarter products.

Let me tell you about a really exciting example in Center Point energy, you know, this is a utility in Texas that realized that the deployment of smart meters out to their clients created a network or devices that look a lot like the networks that they were already managing with the IT tools from tivoli and so they extended this environment from IBM tivoli to manage the deployment of these intelligent meters resulting in improved economic benefits around reduction in time it takes to repair devices, diagnose problems, really a great solution for a smarter utility environment.

Another client example is Swiss Federal Railways, you know, they've used Tivoli Netcool to help prevent outages on their network for a long time and they realize that by putting sensors into the electro mechanical equipment in the railway - railroad equipment that they can begin to understand how to prevent outages, do better maintenance on that physical set of assets just as they're doing with their IT assets, again, a great example of how we're smartening up the planet in this case railroad transportation.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Smart products
• smart meters
• smarter utilities
• Netcool
• Rational software
• Tivoli
• IBM
• Center Point Energy
• Swiss Federal Railways
• Al Zollar