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Everywoman in Tech, datacentre warmth reuse – Laptop Weekly Downtime Add podcast

On this episode, Clare McDonald, Caroline Donnelly and Brian McKenna focus on the Everywoman in Tech awards and its allied Tech Discussion board; “digital boilers” that reuse datacentre warmth for swimming swimming pools and different venues; and NetSuite’s monetary enterprise useful resource planning (ERP) software-as-a-service used for enterprise transformation at Guinness World Data.

After some light-hearted chat round St Patrick’s Day, on which the trio workforce had been recording, Clare will get the present on the highway.

Disclosure and variety

Clare speaks about her attendance on the current Everywoman 2023 Women in Tech awards and its related Tech Forum, at which she is a regular.

First launched in 2011, every year the awards purpose to have fun girls in tech from throughout many sectors and organisations. The Tech Discussion board’s strapline this yr was “folks, planet, progress”. Clare picked out the theme of disclosure from the discussions at that.

Solely an inclusive and protected tradition can present the context for workers to reveal comfortably their LGBTQ+ identities. “You possibly can’t simply throw clean insurance policies down and hope they may match everyone in an organisation,” says Clare. Technological options to social and enterprise issues will solely guarantee progress if the total range of organisations is harnessed, embracing neurodivergence and a spread of gender identifications.

The workforce has a dialogue about attaining extra inclusive cultures, particularly in IT departments and firms the place soccer, beer and pizza will not be going attraction to all genders and ethnic teams. And so they mirror on the brute actuality of patriarchal domination exterior the oasis of the Everywoman occasion, and its like. The wrestle continues and requires allyship from male brokers of change, too.

Digital boilers for swimming swimming pools

Caroline goes on to debate a narrative that had lots of mainstream media curiosity that week. This was that of Deep Inexperienced, a UK startup that gives mini-datacentres, dubbed “digital boilers”, which comprise servers whose waste warmth is was scorching water that can be utilized by native companies. The instance that grabbed the media’s creativeness throughout the week of the podcast recording was Exmouth Leisure Centre, which is home to the first digital boiler deployment, heating its pool. It is very important word that servers will not be dunked in water on this setup.

Caroline notes that there are already superior examples of this within the Nordics, particularly. Trout and lobster farms there have had the warmth reuse remedy. And, within the Devon swimming pool story, she writes on how colocation big Equinix has began constructing a farm on the roof of one in all its datacentre websites in Paris to utilize its waste warmth. The French love their meals.

One basic pattern she picks out is placing datacentre compute energy near the place customers are, in societies which can be more and more digitised. And to reuse datacentre warmth someplace apart from Slough.

Leisure centres are below power value pressures, and prone to closure or diminution of service. It might, Caroline suggests, be good to get extra folks within the UK swimming, for well being advantages. And the extra folks try this, the extra possible it’s that data shall be damaged. This leads on to Brian’s discussion of business transformation at Guinness World Records, partly enabled by the corporate’s use of NetSuite monetary administration software program, delivered as a service.

Guinness World Data continues to blaze a digital path

We’ve got written in regards to the firm earlier than, on its broader journey to the cloud. That was in 2018, and at the moment, Rob Howe, director of IT at Guinness World Data, spoke about how cloud applied sciences had been supporting the organisation’s ongoing push to diversify its enterprise.

This time, within the podcast, Brian relates how Guinness World Records has used NetSuite’s financial ERP software as a service to additional assist its digital transformation. He had interviewed Andy Wooden, finance director on the firm, at Oracle NetSuite’s SuiteConnect occasion.

The enterprise has been round since 1955. Over the previous 20 years, it has gone from publishing an annual e book of data – nonetheless a prime Christmas reward – to consultancy and digital content material creation on tv, the net and social media.

As GWR has diversified, and grown its workplace footprint globally, it had a necessity for a cloud-based monetary ERP that might supply flexibility – having gone from promoting a few merchandise to the identical retailers yearly, to a fancy organisation with a number of groups, closing lots of of offers a yr with lots of of various prospects. And NetSuite has enabled that, additionally hooking up with its Salesforce occasion.

The workforce has a basic chat on the podcast about record-breaking as a social phenomenon. And so they mirror on Computer Weekly’s own Guinness World Record, for the longest-running weekly puzzle column, The Puzzler, written by Jim Howson, starting in 1966 and awarded in 1999.


Podcast music courtesy of Joseph McDade


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