IBM and Ingersoll Rand have announced that they will provide Remote Energy and Asset Management solutions in India to drive greater energy efficiencies for organisations who are engaged in infrastructure creation or maintenance for high growth sectors (commercial, hospitality, health, pharma and others). This solution leverages IBM's Intelligent Building Management (IIBM) system (a combination of monitoring, asset management and advanced analytics) along with Ingersoll Rand's Energy optimisation technologies, to help trigger preventive and predictive maintenance to create Smarter Buildings.

Buildings in India account for 30% of energy consumption. Of this consumption, the major usage is due to HVAC (heating, ventilating and air-conditioning) and lighting. As the Indian economy develops and commercial infrastructure gets built, it becomes essential to drive robust initiatives to improve energy efficiency and sustainability. In the current economic scenario, with rising energy costs, organizations are facing capital and operating budget challenges. Maximizing capital productivity requires increasing asset utilization, efficiency and uptime. Similarly operating costs of energy and maintenance need to be optimized.

Ingersoll Rand, one of the world's leading business groups committed to creating safe and efficient environment, offers its customer's technology convergence solutions by which systems within a facility (such as HVAC, system controls, sophisticated security systems, building management systems, asset tracking, etc), communicate with each other resulting in coordinated responses in various situations. With IBM's data analytic tools, end users will be able to remotely monitor, analyze and record various energy and performance related parameters. The availability of such analytical data will enable greater efficiencies through global benchmarking metrics. With remote management solutions, the end result would be a Network Operations Nerve Center that will monitor distributed assets, analyze large amounts of data for actionable information and optimization, and orchestrate operational processes. This would effectively manage customer assets that drive energy consumption, from a single shared services platform.

Talking about the collaboration, Venkatesh Valluri, Chairman & President, Ingersoll Rand India said, "Ingersoll Rand has been at the forefront of driving 'Innovation and Technology Convergence' and to us this means bringing together organizations and technologies on a common platform and converging them to drive profitable sustainability practices. This partnership is a strategic initiative where IBM and Ingersoll Rand are combining their strengths in operations and management systems to bring end-to-end managed services to customers."

"Technology today can make it possible to "listen" to the abundance of information emitted from buildings. IBM is working towards building a Smarter Planet. This partnership with Ingersoll Rand reaffirms our commitment by using intelligent data to build Smarter Buildings that are accountable for energy and carbon resource use, helping create a sustainable environment." says Nipun Mehrotra, Vice President & General Manager, Sales & Business Development, IBM India/South Asia.

If worldwide energy use trends continue, buildings will become the largest consumer of global energy by 2025, more than the transportation and industrial sectors combined. Smarter Buildings are highly instrumented and interconnected systems of systems - water, power, transportation, etc. Similar to a living system in nature they can be complex, especially when you think about the conglomeration of buildings in a city's history. IBM and Ingersoll Rand believe 2012 would be an exciting time of innovation. There's a confluence of forces - technology, a cultural will and economic pressures - to help make the way we live more energy efficient.