Smarter Water Management

“The pressures on water are enormous. … The world is actually running out of fresh water.”

“The principle problem, generally, that you would have in developing countries is that there’s a very high proportion of system losses. Because of the fact that the infrastructure is very old, it is not unusual to have two-thirds of the water being unaccounted for.”

“Every time you use a liter of water we need to take two liters of water out of the environment. That’s the kind of inefficiency we’re talking about.”

“There’s going to be a different paradigm to the way that we get water. We’re talking about scarcity and floods, we’re talking about climate change, and we’re talking about a breakdown infrastructure.”

“Virtually every business has a water imperative; there’s almost nothing you can manufacture without water. But even those industries that aren’t sensitive to the price of water need to know that they have a steady supply. If that steady supply runs out, even if it’s a small cost component, the manufacturing lines shut down.”

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure. We need all kinds of data collection, including real-time, because it is a lack of credible, available and viable data that is holding us back.”

“The technology exists, the problem is to choose the right technology for the right place.”

“The world’s water problems occur in real time, whether they be diseases caused by pollution, wasteful practices, or misallocation of resources. To protect humans and protect the environment, we need the technological and analytical innovations that enable us to understand and respond to those problems in real-time as well.”

“We need to look at the end-to-end of the water life-cycle and provide holistic approach that will be based on a common platform and framework to address water and waste water management.”

“By having that whole end-to-end system, we can make significant progress in understanding what’s happening to our water and the oceans.”

“If we can put better piping systems in place, if we can monitor and figure out where those leaks exist, early on, I think you can bring, in many cases, those water loss rates down to well below ten percent.”

“The smart companies are actually thinking about the future and thinking about availability and can I even get this water? And that leads to conservation strategies and alternative strategies.”

“SmartBay shows we can meet many environmental challenges using large-scale data collection and distributed intelligence.”

“Never before has there been a way of doing large-scale marine environment research that allows us to observe ecological phenomena at multiple levels at once. IBM’s real-time monitoring technologies, data analytics and next-generation content delivery on SmartBay allow us to do that. ... SmartBay offers a significant new opportunity for Irish industry to create new businesses for Irish technology companies, as well as enhancing the viability of the seafood, shipping and water-monitoring sectors.”

“Our work with IBM has allowed our assets to communicate with us—and we’re doing more than just listening, we’re taking action.”

“The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which treats an average of 80-90 million gallons of wastewater per day during dry weather and up to 370 million gallons of combined wastewater and storm runoff per day during the rainy season, is using technology to enable smarter management of the city’s 1,000 miles of sewer system and three treatment facilities. And water utilities around the world—in Europe, Australia, China, Japan, to name a few—are implementing similar technologies to improve the availability and quality of drinking water and to help add efficiency to the management of water management systems.”