22 Jul 2019 -- IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty announced that IBM Hybrid Cloud is the recipient of the 2019 Chairman's Environmental Award. IBM established this program in 1991 to encourage leadership and recognize achievement in environmental affairs by IBM's business units. For more than a quarter of a century, the Chairman's Environmental Award has celebrated and recognized the environmental achievements of IBM's business organizations.
The focus of the competition for 2019 was on environmental accomplishments of IBM's business units over the past three years in the areas of energy conservation, prevention of pollution, waste minimization and recycling, water conservation, and other environmental topics.
Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO, presents the 2019 Chairman's Environmental Award to Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM.
Around the world, the IBM Hybrid Cloud team has put its expertise to work, deploying creativity in pursuit of environmental leadership. A few highlights:
- Hybrid Cloud consolidated 42 data centers down to just 6 (a 300,000 square foot reduction), reducing the number of servers from 70,000 to 20,000. This achieved a 67% reduction in energy consumption (160,000 MWh/yr), avoiding CO2 emissions of 61,000 metric tons per year.
- SmartRural is a precision agriculture company that helps farmers make more efficient use of their resources and protect their crops via analytics and machine learning. By migrating its analytics platform to the IBM Cloud, SmartRural achieved better crop yields, a 25% reduction in water use, and a 50% reduction in fertilizer use.
- Hybrid Cloud's solution for the NCE Seafood Innovation Cluster in Norway predicts infestation of salmon by sea lice with 70% accuracy, saving the Norwegian salmon industry 7 million salmon per year. One of NCE's customers was able to reduce hydrogen peroxide treatments by 59% as a result.
IBM's cloud strategy is focused on delivering a hybrid cloud platform that enables businesses to use a mix of on-premise, public and privately-operated cloud environments for their data and applications.
The Chairman's Environmental Award recipients are selected based on their degree of environmental leadership, initiative and results. Performance is evaluated against each nominee's opportunity to contribute given its mission and operations. While only one organization is selected each year to receive the Chairman's Environmental Award, the contributions of each nominated organization collectively highlight IBM's worldwide efforts to demonstrate environmental leadership in all of its business activities.