Big Blue Wades Into the Water
Marine Institute of Ireland A buoy in Galway Bay, Ireland, uses sensors in the ocean to collect data on water quality and sea conditions. The SmartBay system, developed by I.B.M. and the Marine Institute of Ireland, provides real-time information to scientists, commercial fishermen, environmental monitoring agencies and the general public.Give I.B.M. credit for technological ambition and a willingness to tackle big problems.
I.B.M. is presenting a new bundle of services and research offerings at the World Water Forum in Istanbul on Monday. The package, grandly called Strategic Water Management Solutions, is the most recent entry in I.B.M.’s so-called smart planet initiative. The “smart planet” label is attached to all of the company’s efforts to put more information technology and analytics into fields from health care to energy.
No one would question that water conservation and management is a big, worthy issue worldwide. Whether I.B.M. can make money in water is another question. It is a field freighted with all sorts of thorny policy and economic issues. Depending on one’s perspective, water is a human right, a public utility or a vast new marketplace ready to take off. Water could be all three of those things, though the ideological constituencies in each camp rarely view it that way.
I.B.M. is betting that water management is a market waiting to happen. Sharon Nunes, vice president of what I.B.M. calls Big Green Innovations, points to government plans for water-related projects as part of infrastructure spending in economic recovery plans around the world. In the United States, she said, some $16 billion of funds for water-related projects are included in the economic stimulus package, while China intends to spend an estimated $51 billion on environmental programs in the next few years, including water projects.