Cisco unveils energy management software

CISCO SEEMS TO be on a roll lately, expanding its interests left, right and centre, with its latest move taking full aim at energy management systems.

The firm has just announced new software to manage energy use in networked computing equipment, which will later be expanded to control building heating and cooling systems too.

The so called EnergyWise software is actually a free upgrade to Cisco Catalyst switches able to measure and control energy usage of IP-connected devices like phones, video surveillance cameras and wireless routers.

But Cisco has bigger plans, hoping to roll out its EnergyWise programme in three stages. Yesterday's launch marked the beginning of the first phase, but by summer, Cisco hopes to have expanded EnergyWise to encompass support for third-party devices like PCs, laptops and printers. In this phase, firms using EnergyWise would be able to set specific policies on energy use and even decide to have all PCs or networking equipment go into sleep mode at certain pre-defined times.

The third stage, which Cisco hopes to get underway by 2010, would even extend EnergyWise to cover non-IP building management systems like lights, fire alarms, elevators, air conditioning, heating and even employee badge systems, all through just one, expensive Cisco interface.

To help it get the job done, Cisco has bought up middleware technology maker, Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence, to help integrate building management infrastructure and IT applications over an IP architecture.

Cisco had better watch its back, though as IBM has started making similar noises about building energy management systems for both IT equipment and building infrastructure systems. µ