Telos Uses Microsoft Surface to Make Managing Carbon Footprints, Networks Fun

Microsoft's Surface is still out there, and still pretty amazing even if it doesn't get much limelight--case in point: Telos corp has two neat new apps for Surface that let you manage your company's assets in real time like they do in the movies.

Both systems use Telos' Se7en app framework, which leverages Surface's multi-touch, multi-user powers to create a collaborative system that lets you react to and manipulate real time, or near-real time data (think of the sorts of digital workstations that sometimes pop up in CSI or Bones depending on whether this week's writers are sci-fi fans or not).

The "Enterprise Network Management" system does pretty much what you think it does, and may transform your sysadmin from a flex-fingered nimble typist into more of a Tom Cruise gesture-based uber-computer operator. Or perhaps not. What it actually does is "network architecture management" by "providing integrated map-based geospatial and network infrastructure design and data management," and it's sophisticated enough to manage a global-scale enterprise network.

Meanwhile, the Green Initiative system is more headline-grabbing, and it purports to turn management of your company's eco efforts from dry and fusty office-based decision making into a dynamic, computer-aided real-time affair. Primarily, it gives a "secure view" of a company's "power and processing efficiency" by presenting how much energy consumption is going on, how this effects carbon footprint, and how it compares to benchmark performance levels. The operators will be able to grab CO2 data, temperature, humidity, "dust and contaminants" and thus make live decisions about whether to tweak ongoing processes to achieve better efficiency--resulting in power savings and thus improved eco-impact.

Never has managing real-time operations of a company looked so damn cool. Is this the future? Possibly.

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