Nick Yates on Travel

Author: Nick Yates

All that heat your office computers put out in the course of enabling your company to stay connected daily with the marketplace — suppose it could be captured and channeled in useful ways?

The next approach to providing efficient cooling for increasingly powerful IT hardware systems may be a move away from air cooling toward water cooling.  Especially as the trend toward stacking computer chips one on top of another internally, to improve communication between them, is making heat dissipation a problem that threatens to outgrow traditional air-cooling solutions.  In the huge regional data centers which have sprung up to handle the flow and storage of information, a more efficient manner of handling excess heat is already much needed.

Some technicians are thinking out of the box to solve this problem.  Innovations such as micro-sized circulation channels fabricated into high performance silicon chips, for instance, allow water to circulate through and cool critical parts.  Water, even in miniscule amounts, can absorb heat thousands of times more efficiently than mere air.  And water’s cooling efficiency may become absolutely necessary as computers continue to gain computing power while simultaneously shrinking in size.

The heat from a medium-sized data center, consuming one megawatt of power, could potentially be used to heat about seventy average-sized homes!  Suppose the heat transferred out of your company’s own number-crunching computers could be channeled to heat your own office space or that of your entire building?  Or perhaps used to lessen the need for electricity to heat water for sanitation or production purposes?

Pairing a necessary function such as equipment cooling with other critical needs could have a very real effect on the total output of pollutants by municipal power plants.  While lowering office electricity bills, this otherwise wasted heat energy could be recycled into useful purposes that both save money and lessen the dependence on outside resources.

With today’s emphasis on “green” living, that could prove popular indeed. This has been Nick Yates with another installment of business tactics.

The rise in energy prices has added not only to families’ transportation costs but to those of businesses as well.  High energy prices have also diverted extra dollars away from non-energy consumer spending.

Happily for both businesses and consumers the recent energy price increases have, as might be expected in a free market economy, resulted in a rise in innovation which promises relief — perhaps soon.

The world car industry seems to have set aside, at least for now, its quest for a usable hydrogen fuel cell to powered its cars — in favor of more readily attainable battery power technology.  According to scientists, we’re close to producing practical and affordable batteries for use in electric cars, and within the next few years mass produced and affordable electric cars should actually start rolling off assembly lines in numbers.  Several leading car companies are now talking about a model year 2010 kickoff.

Initially, such cars will include small internal combustion engines which will be used primarily to provide charge for batteries rather than for propulsion.  What seems do-able now are cars that can travel forty or so miles on a single charge, but which are able to go beyond this by using small fuel engines to generate electricity and top-up batteries while on the road.

If battery charging can be reduced from six hours down to mere minutes — as might well become the case as battery technology evolves — shopping mall parking lots could feature free charging stations as a lure to shoppers.

Larger vehicles such as trucks may have to continue to rely on souped-up diesel engines for power.  But with passenger cars out of the mix, diesel fuel prices should fall accordingly.

If all this results in lower — or at least stabilized — transportation costs, businesses should benefit not only from lower overall production costs but also from the freeing up of consumer dollars for purchases of other goods and services.

Which would be good news indeed. Fuel costs in Australia are still very much an issue, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. This has been Nick Yates with your business installment for the week.

As your business grows your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software may face growing capacity problems.

Where to go from there?  There are robust software options on the market designed for small, mid-sized and large companies — Microsoft’s Dynamics AX and Infor, to name two in the mid-sized range.  The Fortune 500 crowd may opt for truly heavyweight systems such as SAP or Oracle.

But to whichever solution your company turns, there will be conversion issues that many business will imperfectly come to grips with.  Starting off in-house.  No amount of reasoning is going to convince some hold-out staffers that they need to spend mega-hours learning some new system — and then to labor mightily to put it in place.  Also, the new system designated by management isn’t going to immediately win all hearts and minds.  There will be as many perceived benefits to alternative systems as there are hearts in your office to champion them.

And, sad to say, software salespersons sometimes exaggerate.  Really.  The ease with which your legacy systems will roll over into the new one may not (read will not) quite live up to pre-sale predictions.  Be ready for operational havoc — and have the foresight to plan conversions for the least busy part of the business quarter.

Make sure the vendor supplying the enterprise software assigns their top people to the account.  The last thing your company needs is to find itself paying top consultant dollars to train new consultants in the software they’re already supposed to know!  Have the names and requested hours of preferred consultants included in the purchase deal itself, just so there’s no misunderstanding about your expectations.

And get the consultants’ advice before attempting to customize the new system to better meet your needs.  Not every change you affect will sit well with the underlying program code.  Ditto for that legacy data you might be sorely tempted to blithely feed in without any serious second thoughts.  What’s the saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread?

And do keep in mind that the full advantages of modern enterprise systems only come to those prepared to winkle them out.  Remain alive to potentialities and open to learning about them.