Skanska USA today announced a strategic partnership with OSIsoft, a leading data infrastructure supplier that provides an integrated platform to monitor and manage operational data for critical facilities infrastructure.

The partnership came on the heels of the release of a study sponsored by Skanska, a member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, entitled "Transforming the Market: Energy Efficiency in Buildings."

"Data centers are not sustainable from a capital or environmental perspective ,"said Senior Vice President of Skanska Mission Critical Jakob Carnemark. "We are focused on delivering a dynamic connection between application deployment and resulting infrastructure and energy requirements. This feedback loop is the key to driving a sustainable computing model it willand will allow companies to optimize on efficiency of capital, energy and their overall carbon footprint."

The OSIsoft PI System compiles data center information from IT assets as well as from operational and facilities systems, resulting in an energy conscious environment that enables real-time reporting and decision-support monitoring. Skanska has extended this platform with real time optimization algorithms, reducing energy use by continuously adapting to changes like environment, equipment performance and IT load.

OSIsoft Vice President Martin Otterson said "Skanska is bringing its's unique understanding of engineering, construction and operations coupled with OSIsoft's expertise is sure to drive energy efficiency improvements in the data center and building sector. Together, we intend to exceed the target of 60% versus 24% on energy efficiency improvements for existing data centers."

The study on energy use in buildings is the most rigorous study ever conducted on the subject and the findings apply to both existing and new building It identified immediate actions as critical for success, and part of this immediate action is a partnership between Skanska and OSIsoft to integrate energy information from multiple data sources in data centers.

Without the OSIsoft PI System, much of the energy information is isolated in proprietary systems and cannot be optimized.

The partnership will focus on three key areas, optimizing application deployment efficiency including energy, water and infrastructure, creating dynamic feedback loops to drive more efficient design and lower build cost of data centers and driving greater reliability of data centers by leveraging dynamic data to improve maintenance and operations.

Today, buildings use more energy than any other sector in the world - approximately 38 percent of the global energy use compared with 33 percent for industry and 26 percent for transportation sectors. The growing use of computers and other office equipment presents a challenge in this subsector.

Total greenhouse gas emissions from IT equipment (including data centers) are growing at about 6% a year.