Lenovo Goes Green, IBM Adds Mashup Security

Lenovo Group, Ltd. announced new ThinkVision monitors and ThinkCenter desktops with environmentally friendly ratings and characteristics. Elsewhere, IBM Corp. announced new technology to help enterprises secure data "mashups" for corporate applications.

Focal Points:

• Lenovo detailed the availability of nine new ThinkVision monitors that have achieved the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool's (EPEAT) highest "gold" rating. The new full monitor lineup includes both 17 inch and 19 inch displays that are designed to reduce power consumption and are manufactured with fewer harmful materials including lead and mercury. Gold is the highest rating assigned by EPEAT and is a designation reserved for only the most environmentally friendly designs. Two of the new monitors, the ThinkVision L174 and L197 Wide include technology that reduces the number of bulbs needed from four to two, while adding new brightness enhancements that improve operating efficiency and performance. Pricing starts at $239.99 for the L174 and $259.99 for the L197 Wide.
• Lenovo's new ThinkCenter M57/M57P desktops are ultra small desktop PCs that have achieved GREENGUARD certification. GREENGUARD is a certification that evaluates electronic products on 2,000 different chemical emissions characteristics. The M57/M57P is reportedly the quietest ThinkCenter to date and has attained extremely quiet acoustic output levels to reduce the amount of sound generated while the system is in use. Pricing for the M57 begins at $699.
• IBM has detailed a new technology called SMash, a combination of the words "Secure Mashup," to help enterprises address the security issues inherent when combining applications and data from disparate data sources. Mashups are of particular concern when the sources of data draw from both enterprise and Internet sources, thereby potentially exposing the corporation to the vulnerabilities from the Internet as well as endangering secured corporate data to Internet access. The technology will also be included in the commercial Lotus Mashup product expected to arrive this summer. IBM also intends to freely share the SMash technology with the OpenAjax Alliance to help open source developers make their application sets more secure.

Experton Group believes Lenovo has embraced environmental concerns as a key enabler of its technology base, and has worked diligently to include as many green capabilities in its new and revised platforms as is economically and developmentally feasible. Similarly, all vendors are working hard on this front and independent vendor rankings demonstrate that the majority of hardware OEMs have improved their positions significantly over the last few years. IT executives should consider energy efficiency as their top criteria for environmental ranking, followed thereafter by raw materials usage and manufacturing techniques.

All vendor RFPs should include tightly defined environmental criteria mandates, and these mandates should ideally be largely reusable across all RFP requests. Mashups allow users to create unique added value applications without requiring programming knowledge or direct access to protected applications or databases. Experton Group believes mashups can offer users the ability to gain greater insight from the binding of enterprise and Internet data sources, and that mashup development tools are easy and offer rapid application development. IT executives should enable mashup-building technologies as part of their collaboration and service-oriented architecture (SOA) frameworks, but will need to spend significant effort ensuring that data access controls and security levels are kept appropriately in check over the short- and long-term.