1E

A Passion for Conservation: NightWatchman from 1E Helps Companies Reduce Carbon Emissions

Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E

When Sumir Karayi was a student at Warwick University he had a passion for recycling. He could often be seen trudging across the campus, pushing shopping carts of rubbish to be recycled. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also had a passion for a fellow environmentalist, Barbara. She became his partner in campus recycling and later became his partner in life, marrying Karayi.

 

Both of Karayi’s passions have continued unabated. He and his wife recently celebrated their 20th anniversary. And Karayi is now in a position to have a broad impact on environmental sustainability as Chief Executive Officer of 1E, the London-based provider of automation solutions that help companies streamline their information technology operations, cut power consumption and costs, and reduce their carbon footprints.

The company’s NightWatchman software is deployed on more than 2 million PCs worldwide, eliminating more than 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Dell uses NightWatchman to manage power consumption across 50,000 PCs—and expects to save U.S.$1.8 million a year, a 40 percent saving of its computer-related energy bill. Verizon Wireless projects $1.3 million in annual savings from energy reduction.

That’s quite a step up from Karayi’s days trying to convince the college council to recycle its discarded cardboard.

But it almost didn’t happen. 1E wasn’t founded to promote environmental sustainability and its first product, SMSWakeUp (now called 1E WakeUp), didn’t have anything to do with energy conservation. The product was designed to turn on—or “wake up”—PCs out of office hours, so that security and other software updates could be installed without causing disruption to PC users. During one installation of SMSWakeUp at a Swiss bank, Karayi and his colleagues realized that the product was good for more than enabling software updates to be deployed during the night—it could also be used to turn on PCs a few minutes before workers came into the office in the morning, so that they could be productive immediately, rather than having to wait to boot up their machines. And there was more.

If we could automate the turning off of PCs when they weren’t needed, we could save tremendous amounts of money and energy. Sumir Karayi Chief Executive Officer, 1E

“We did a study with the bank and realized that timing the startup of PCs was only part of the benefit we could deliver,” recalls Karayi. “If we could automate the turning off of PCs when they weren’t needed, we could save tremendous amounts of money and energy.”

Several obstacles stood in the way of automating the shutdown of PCs. Various departments or offices within a company close down at different times, necessitating the ability to set different shutdown times. Many workers would leave documents or e-mail messages open on their computer desktops when they left for the day; an automated shutdown solution would need to save those files before turning off machines, and then open them automatically in the morning so that workers could return to find their screens just as they’d left them. Employees might occasionally work longer hours, necessitating the ability to override preset shutdown times. A solution for automated powering down of desktop computers had to monitor and report on the energy states of those PCs, so that a company could quickly and accurately demonstrate the results.

1E created a product that accomplished all this and more, called NightWatchman. Using conservative calculations, 1E estimates that an average-sized company with 10,000 desktop computers can prevent 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually by using the software. Across the U.S., this adds up to 14.4 million tons of CO2 emissions—the same amount produced by 2.58 million passenger cars. These figures take into account the 50 percent of PC users that claim to use “hibernation” or “sleep” mode settings, although it’s unclear whether users fully understand the power savings achieved by these functions.

 “One of the key benefits of NightWatchman is that this is a simple, quick solution that doesn’t require an ambitious power savings plan,” says Karayi. “Companies can use their existing hardware, preventing legacy hardware from being needlessly reduced to e-waste or recycled before its utility has expired. And the typical payoff is delivered in three to six months.”

It was important to Karayi that 1E base its solution on Microsoft® technologies—in part because Windows® is the operating system of the vast majority of desktop computers in use today. But that was only part of his thinking. “Microsoft provided the best tools for us to create our solutions,” he says. “The Microsoft development tools enabled us to cut our delivery time to market by up to two thirds. The Microsoft System Center products provide a superb foundation to manage and control an enterprise-wide environment.” (See sidebar.)

In the days before environmental sustainability became a global phenomenon, NightWatchman wasn’t an easy sell. IT departments would be the ones to invest in deploying and maintaining the solution—but facilities management departments would get the credit for the energy savings achieved. Karayi and his colleagues had to become creative.

“We had to identify the full scope of benefits made possible by NightWatchman, and who they would affect,” he says. “For the IT department, we emphasize that the product enables remote management of the entire desktop estate, enabling IT managers to bolster security by applying critical updates when desired, without impacting on the productivity of PC users. For the facilities manager, NightWatchman is a major contributor to significant cost reductions. And for the emerging field of corporate social responsibility officers, NightWatchman is an important part of an environmental sustainability and carbon emissions reduction program.”

The typical payoff is delivered in three to six months. Sumir Karayi Chief Executive Officer, 1E

Dell was one of the companies to see the “green” promise of NightWatchman. “We want to take an industry-leading approach to energy conservation,” says Jay Taylor, Senior Engineer Global Strategist at Dell. “The technology is now available to make significant improvements in energy conservation and we set out to deploy that technology in order to both conserve energy and cut costs.”

For Dell, as for other companies, the electricity needed to run unused computers left on at night and over weekends was only a part of the wasted expense. These computers were also creating heat, which required facilities to increase their cooling, which wasted even more energy and costs. To address its energy concerns, Dell brought together a companywide team including product managers, facilities managers, the chief technology officer, and IT groups.

As part of their solution, the Dell team chose the combination of 1E NightWatchman and SMSWakeUp. Dell identified that 95 percent of its computers could be automatically powered down overnight and powered up before workers returned in the morning—the few exceptions being in areas such as building management and manufacturing control systems. Dell finds that its average computer consumes just three to five watts per hour when shut down, as opposed to the average 89 watts consumed by idling desktops. In all, Dell expects to save $1.8 million a year, saving 40 percent of its computer-related energy costs, by applying the 1E software across 50,000 PCs.

As companies have recognized and accepted their roles in environmental sustainability, 1E’s NightWatchman has become increasingly popular. 1E has seen its revenues grow 50 percent in each of the last four years, during which the company has consistently made the “Tech Track” list of the London Sunday Times as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the United Kingdom.

But Karayi says his mission to promote environmental sustainability isn’t over yet. If all companies across the United States used NightWatchman with their Windows systems, they would prevent 14.4 million tons of carbon dioxide annually from reaching the atmosphere—the equivalent of taking all the cars in the state of Maryland off the road. In the United Kingdom, 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide are unnecessarily being emitted by always-on PCs—the equivalent of a typical gas-fired power station. The combined potential reduction of carbon dioxide emissions for the United States and United Kingdom alone equals more than 15 million tons per year.

Beyond PC power management, the Nomad Enterprise solution from 1E, a software and operating system distribution product that is often used with NightWatchman and 1E WakeUp, reduces the amount of power a company needs to use to power its computer servers. This product reduces the strain on servers and, through efficient software distribution to branch environments with bandwidth-constrained connectivity, also has the ability to reduce the number of servers that an organization needs.

Through a software update and security patch distribution method called “multicasting,” Nomad Enterprise allows a company to push updates from a central location to a single PC, which can then distribute updates to the rest of the PCs through the local area network. The product is gaining in popularity because of its ability to reduce a large company’s server population by approximately 10,000. For agribusiness leader Sygenta, Nomad Enterprise reduced the secondary site server count by 50 percent.

Sumir Karayi has his sights firmly set on reducing the impact of IT on the environment. His passion is the driving force behind his leadership of a company that aims to achieve a brighter future.

 

Under the Hood

1E’s NightWatchman software conserves the electricity otherwise consumed by unattended desktop computers by integrating with and complementing the energy-conservation features of the Windows® software that most companies already use on their desktop PCs and servers. NightWatchman uses and extends the power-state configuration feature of Windows Vista®, as well as the remote management and update features of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Microsoft SQL Server® provides database support, with solution components written using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005, Visual C++®, and Visual C#®, and presented using Microsoft ASP.NET.

 
Learn more about 1E at:
www.1E.com