Over the past month or so the industry has seen many major announcements. We had Force10 and Turin merge, Nortel declared bankruptcy, Cisco's rumored server play, Genesys acquired a couple of companies, Lotusphere 2009 and HP announced Procurve One. Among the most recent announcements that I think went somewhat under the radar but has potentially big implications are Cisco's EnergyWise announcements.In the near term, to quote Inbar Lasser-Raab of Cisco, Energy Wise "polls the enterprise and switches off devices that do not need to be on, or re-sets them to use less power." OK, so when I read that, it doesn't sound all that exciting. We've had wake on LAN, power management on PCs and things like that for years. However, if you look at the long term roadmap of what EnergyWise could bring, you start to understand the potential here.
First, to get some perspective of why this could be potentially huge for Cisco, think about all the things in a building that are currently networked but not networked together. Elevator systems, surveillance systems, badge readers, HVAC systems, power management, etc. We've talked about convergence now for ages (especially this community) but the truth is all we've really done is converge technology things. However, even though the convergence has been somewhat limited, it has paid big dividends for many organizations.
Metcalf's Law states something to the effect that the value of a network grows exponentially with the number of endpoints attached to it, so it makes sense that when we brought all of our voice, video and data on to a common network, we could get increased value. Now extend the number of nodes to all the facilities-based things in a company, and the network value grows exponentially once again. By connecting all of the IT and facilities based endpoints, organizations can make much smarter decisions on how those end points should operate and, more importantly, automate many of those tasks to optimize the value.
From a vision perspective, EnergyWise should paint the picture of a worker swiping a badge to get into the office in the morning. The network would know who the user is and would automatically turn on the worker's PC, IP phone, the wireless access point in that area, printers, the air conditioning in the worker's office and other environment controls. Nothing else should be impacted by this. In today's environment, a worker badges in, flips on all the lights, complains it's too hot (or too cold if you're in Boston), goes to print something and then gets frustrated because the printer was turned off and now needs to warm up, etc. You get the picture. In theory EnergyWise could follow workers through buildings and shut services off and on automatically as needed, using the absolute minimum amount of power required.
The other element of EnergyWise that Cisco really didn't touch on was the security angle. If you can correlate where workers are at any moment in time with activity such as failed passwords, when certain elevators were accessed, etc, organizations can gain greater intelligence regarding any kind of security breach. I understand that a company could do some of this now since the information exists today, but the correlation and analysis is all manual. The EnergyWise vision would allow much of this to be automated.
Critics of this initiative may look at what I've outlined and say that this vision is way out there and a bit Star Trekish in a way (or big brotherish if you're paranoid) and I agree it may be out there, but this industry needs to start somewhere. EnergyWise shouldn't be looked at as just a Cisco initiative, as well. Having more things connected to our network raises the overall value of the network and creates opportunity for everyone. Unified communications vendors can harness this information and make more intelligent decisions on where to route information based on physical or environmental conditions. Security vendors can extend the reach of their products into these other networks and have more information to learn from, etc.
In summary, Cisco's EnergyWise may have been overshadowed by many of the other news events of the past month, some them being other Cisco news stories. However, when I think out into the future about living in a world where "everything is connected," this may have been the most future-looking of all the news events from this past month.
