Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. I'm here with Dave Bartlett. We are at IBM's Pulse 2011 event. Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We are talking about smarter buildings at the event quite a lot. It seems to be one of the focuses that IBM are looking at very strongly. Is it all science fiction or is this kind of stuff that we can do today? Or are we talking a year or two years? What's the kind of time scale that we're looking at for this kind of stuff? No, it's today a very present possibility. You know, when we stepped back and looked at what's happened in the last decade, it's just been a rapid acceleration and proliferation of smart sensors. Every appliance going into buildings now has smart technology into it. So they're all emitting all these digital feeds. So that's where the Building Whisperer comes in. There's all this data. If someone just really listens to it end-to-end, it's amazing the opportunity we have today just to integrate into those systems and save energy. Sure, but these buildings are emitting data. But, I mean, how long is it going to take to actually get something out there that will be able to integrate all these feeds and present it to somebody? Okay, so, you know, when you look at it, they're emitting a lot of data from different equipment types. So there's different protocols to deal with, different networks to deal with. It's a lot of data. That's the second thing. Third, it really does need an IT focus in addition to the building management skills. And that's what IBM does so well. I was able to find technology that exists today off the shelf in IBM to really do the monitoring connection to the equipment, to do the data warehousing, to do the analytics, to build the dashboard. That technology all exists today. So it's just a matter of connecting it. And connecting, it turns out, is not a big deal. So we can do it today. You're going to market with products for building managers to run buildings and global facilities?
2:05Absolutely. In fact, when I presented it to our chairman, he said, well, this is great. Take it to market. But I want to start within IBM, which I thought was some great leadership. So just from the past year, we've implemented it not only in our headquarters building, but in one of our biggest energy-using sites. And it's already exceeded the base case in terms of savings and given a 200% return on the investment. Wow. And I mean, what's the kind of global marketplace for this kind of stuff? Well, I mean, there's lots of different estimates. But, you know, there's been a study done by a climate group called Smart 2020 that said, if we do exactly what we're doing, apply existing communication IT technology to this space, that we could save, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in energy between now and the year 2020. Okay. Dave, that's great. Thanks a million for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.