James Governor's Monkchips

Announcing New Line of Business, New Analyst: Greenmonk’s Tom Raftery

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As I explained over at Greenmonk I have been biting my tongue for a couple of days on this one, since Tom Raftery accepted my offer of employment at RedMonk.

We’re starting a new line of business under the Greenmonk name, and Tom will allow me to drive a Green and sustainability research agenda and advisory services without compromising my commitment to RedMonk’s traditional middleware, developer and open source business. If anyone would like to sponsor the GreenMonk blog I would be happy to hear from you. In a special one time offer I will give you pride of place for six months for $3000 dollars.

So what is Greenmonk and how is it different from RedMonk (I really wish I had Stephen’s Q&A skills)?

While there are clear similarities because be applying RedMonk’s open source analysis model to a new space, there are also some clear differences. RedMonk focuses on technology itself, while Greenmonk is going to look at how technology is applied. How can we use what we have learned in IT to improve energy consumption in the broad sense. We talk about workload management in IT but don’t reapply the discipline to our use of energy except in exceptional cases such as IBM’s customer Delaware Electricity.

This week saw American Airlines introduce charges for carrying bags in the hold. British Airlines claims smaller European airlines are unsustainable once oil is above $80. This week oil hit $135. By year end its surely going to hit $200… which Greenmonk believes will begin to drive massive innovation. The constraint has arrived. Now we need to start designing around it.

Whether we’re talking about traveling less, heating buildings using excess energy from data centers, only buying power when its cheap because the local wind farms are working efficiently, dealing with Green Tape (the rise of new Carbon and pollution related regulations). There is the moral imperative to digitise everything, which I call Bit Miles. There is a lot going on. Companies such as Nortel and Cisco are now competing on the basis of energy efficiency (see the fight going on in the comments on this blog). We want to help businesses contextualise and prioritise, deal with the Risk that spiking energy costs bring. How can IT focus on the really big problems. We don’t intend to focus on the Green Data Center, but note that Tom recently built a hyper efficient plant in the Cork Internet Exchange. He has real world experience of energy demand management, design and innovation.

RedMonk prides itself on calling trends and futures. We’re going to bring this experience of trend watching and analysis to the green space. The new competitive landscape for all businesses is going to include a green is lean component. We’ll be working to help businesses understand the change.

Finally in terms of Tom’s skill-set we have a guy that is made for RedMonk. He is a great communicator and has a brilliant reputation as a social media expert, and you all know how much we love using the latest tools to help build our communities, and so make us smarter than the competition. Tom is @tomraftery on twitter. Please follow him. He has been podcasting for years, so expect us to establish a Greenmonk series. Again once we get started we’ll be open to sponsorship offers.

So grassroots and top-down analysis and advisory. That’s Greenmonk. Welcome to Tom. Expect some new client announcements in the very near future. I am close to closing a couple of deals. This space is exploding. The other night when I heard back from Tom I was in a great optimistic mood. I told my wife: I feel like a businessman. That is I am going after a market opportunity in exactly the right way- by growing to meet the demand. It’s exciting.

8 comments

  1. This is excellent news. Another great example of Redmonk leading the way. Congrats!

  2. […] is great hire for the RedMonk team and solidifies their belief in green tech – James goes as far as to say that GreenMonk is far more than a blog – but now a business line […]

  3. Congrats guys, and welcome Tom! Just off to Twitter to follow…

  4. Well done both.
    Was wondering when you were going to add someone, and I cant think of a better fit. I’ve read and listened to Tom for a while, he will slip right in. Cote and Tom on a podcast will indeed sound soothing.

  5. This is so smart, but why am I not surprised. Kudos guys!

  6. well, bravo. A fine idea.
    I don’t know Tom but I guess I will..

    Airlines are an interesting problem. Hybrids, public transit, and bicycling can help a good deal with oil costs for local transportation, but there is nothing on the horizon to replace oil-thirsty airplanes.

  7. […] or bottom up adoption of technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. In May 2008, RedMonk announced the launch of a new line of business, Greenmonk, and the hiring of a new analyst, Tom Raftery. […]

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