Cloud Computing is a disruptive business model’: Balki G Iyer, Chief Development Officer, Bharat Light and Power by Srikanth RP, InformationWeek, February 21, 2014 Bharat Light and Power (BLP), a leading renewable energy producer in India, recently formed a strategic engagement with IBM. The agreement will see BLP use IBM's cloud capabilities to significantly enhance its power generation ability. In this context, InformationWeek met Balki G Iyer, Chief Development Officer, BLP, who shares how the company is using cloud to gain a competitive advantage inShare 6 Enlarge Image More Insights Webcasts Online Banking Trends and Security Threats in India Future Proof your enterprise Mobile device security with Samsung KNOX More Downloads Cisco Virtualized Multiservice Data Center Framework: Deliver IT as a Service Taking technology to Mid-size Enterprises and SMBs Top Ten Considerations when Evaluating Unified Communications Solutions More India's energy infrastructure is highly strained, with an ever increasing demand for energy. To sustain its growth trajectory, India needs to meet its energy demands in an environmentally sustainable manner. This calls for intelligent analysis of data for energy generated from various sources like wind, solar, biomass and hydro technologies. Taking a huge step in this direction, Bharat Light and Power (BLP), a leading renewable energy producer in India, recently formed a strategic engagement with IBM. The agreement will see BLP use IBM's cloud capabilities to significantly enhance its power generation ability. As one of the largest clean energy generation companies in India, BLP aims to address the sustainable energy challenge by increasing its renewable energy generation capacity to one gigawatt (GW) over the next few years. Sharing more details on how BLP plans to use technology for competitive advantage, Balki G Iyer, Chief Development Officer, BLP, shares his perspective on how the deal with IBM will help his firm. Some edited excerpts: How acute is the problem of power shortage in India? India is a power deficit country, and according to industry estimates, approximately 400 million people in India do not have access to electricity. From a human development index perspective, if the US consumes 30,000 units per person, India consumes 600 units per person. India also has a growing population and a natural resources problem, which makes India a perfect case for clean energy generation. As a large clean energy generation company in India, what are some of your biggest challenges? As a clean energy company, we focus on wind, solar, biomass and hydro technologies for power generation. For a company like us, our challenges lie in execution and in improving the operational efficiencies of plants in remote locations. If a wind turbine breaks down, then we have to send our field staff to fix it – which is a major issue as most of our wind farms are located in remote regions. How can IT and more specifically, a technology like cloud computing help? Our partnership with IBM will help us gather valuable insights from the data generated, which will ensure that BLP has an integrated view of its operations and is equipped to take pro-active measures. Using IBM's mobile technology, we will be able to provide all the information, analyzed on the cloud platform, to our ground staff on their handsets and alert them well in advance. This will enable us to build smarter operations with higher efficiency and greater utilization. IBM will also help us in centrally monitoring and managing BLP's existing and future generation plants as well as store and manage the data on the cloud. This will also help us in being proactive than being reactive. For example, if a gear box is likely to go down, we can predict this incident, months in advance and take appropriate action. Using analytics, we can also build accurate wind forecasting models and use this analysis for improving our production and overall operational efficiencies. The key is in being able to predict and improve power generation and bring down the percentage of device breakdowns through proactive monitoring. Overtime, we envisage this to be a shared platform, which can be offered as a service to other companies. We believe that cloud computing is a disruptive business model and has the potential to deliver huge transformational benefits for enterprises.
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