Case Study: IBM deploys Web 2.0 collaborative solutions for a greener world

This example demonstrates how IBM has used Web 2.0 solutions such as Lotus and WebSphere Portal to save more than US$100 million in call and travel costs annually, reduce carbon emissions by over 60,000 metric tons per year, and improve collaboration.

Background about the company, the industry, and the products/solutions offered

IBM is the world's leading information technology company, offering a range of integrated solutions, products and services unmatched by any other IT company. Yet, IBM’s global footprint has resulted in several challenges:

• With 370,000 employees worldwide, operating in 64 countries, IBM employees need to be able to collaborate with one another - and with partners and customers - on a geographically dispersed basis.
• Employees require “anytime, anywhere” access to expert advice, resources and continuous training to make better and faster decisions.
• The large number of employees raises demand for applications, servers, network capacity and storage requirements; all of which could push up power, cooling and space costs.

What Web 2.0 solutions are being used by IBM

As a respected global brand, IBM constantly strives to demonstrate environmental leadership in all of its business activities. IBM decided to enhance collaboration through Web 2.0 technologies and run them on the latest platforms that offered:

• Better collaboration and improved decision making for its employees.
• The ability to realise cost savings and carbon emissions through green IT solutions.

The IBM Web 2.0 collaboration solutions deployed were:

• IBM Lotus Sametime to provide employees worldwide with the ability to instantly collaborate through instant messaging, presence awareness and web conferencing capabilities.
• IBM Lotus Notes and Domino as the preferred email solutions, selected for their ability to support even more users per server, improved data compression and compatibility with existing hardware.
• IBM WebSphere Portal which serves as a unified platform for employee discussion forums, wikis, blogs and learning resources.
• IBM Lotus Mashups to provide an environment for assembling personal, enterprise and Web content into simple, flexible, and dynamic applications.
• IBM Lotus Connections opens new channels for productive relationships through social computing. It helps employees enlarge their collaborative, knowledge-sharing networks, enables the business to tap the collective intelligence of employees, and facilitates faster, better business execution.
• IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1 allows teams to share content, collaborate and work faster online - inside or outside the IBM firewall.

How have Web 2.0 solutions directly helped the company become greener?

The benefits of IBM utilising its own collaborative solutions have been impressive:

• Today, IBM saves up to US$16 million per year in phone costs, thanks to the use of instant messaging.
• A further US$97 million has been slashed from travel budgets, while IBM’s carbon footprint in the US has reduced by more than 61,600 metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2006.
• Almost a third of IBM’s global workforce use Web conferencing and Voice over IP to work from home, further reducing carbon emissions from constant commuting.
• IBM’s Europe operations have also slashed energy-per-employee consumed by 50% thanks to more efficient office designs; Austria, Switzerland and Germany, in particular, have saved US$2.8 million in annual energy costs.
• Lotus and WebSphere Portal solutions are also designed to require fewer servers, resulting in lower power consumption and a smaller physical space. Furthermore, leading data compression technologies at the heart of these solutions further reduce disk storage, network traffic, and backup costs.

Apart from a lower carbon footprint, IBM has also created a highly cost-efficient environment for innovation, often resulting in decreased “time to market”. Furthermore, these collaborative solutions have strengthened IBM’s reputation for being family friendly – thanks to more flexible work arrangements.

Convenient solutions to an inconvenient truth

Moving forward, IBM expects the focus on environmental issues to become even more intense. By utilising real solutions that can make a real and quantifiable difference to the climate challenge, IBM demonstrates that an “inconvenient truth” can be made much more palatable through convenient and innovative solutions.