MW: And some of the applications for this in terms of managing water flow in drought prone areas or just in heavy agricultural areas, what are some of the potential uses for this?

PW: Okay, so it would be -- might be organizations collaborating to record water usage from a particular river or from, let's say, the Great Lakes or whatever, the Ogalalla Aquifer, whatever resource we're talking about. It might be organizations collaborating to share water quality data, so you can sort of picture for the entire water resource, not just the small parts of it.

It might be organizations collaborating to manage levies. The idea of being, you know, to say you bring these organizations together, you enable them, you provide the tooling to enable them to work together to create the information base that they work from, and you've added value to society by doing that. And at the same time, we then created show pieces we hope for the value that information technology can bring to water management.

MW: And there are some industrial applications for this as well, for water intensive industries to get a grip on exactly what their water use is and ways to make that more efficient.

PW: It could potentially work in that area, but the primary impact we're aiming at first of all is, I mean, if you've got a heavily water extractive industry in a specific area, you can't manage the water resources in an integrated way without involving that industry. And if we can provide the basics for the conversation necessary for that to happen, then again, we've added value.

We do, not through our water organization, but we're already finding, for example, in the Netherlands, where we're doing water work that a lot of industries are actually very -- a lot of -- sorry, agencies are actually very willing to talk to each other through IBM where they wouldn't necessarily be willing to talk to each other direction. And we're finding that people look at us a kind of a neutral broker. And, you know, it's actually a role that we can play in the course of going about our work, and that's absolutely fine. We have no objection to that. Indeed, we welcome it.

MW: Why do you think that is?

PW: I think it's partly because -- well, I don't know. It's partly I guess because we have not historically have not been very active in the water industry and we're relatively new. But I think it's partly because people are beginning to recognize the strength of our argument, if you will, around the notion that a large part of water management is information management. And, you know, that's the argument we've been advancing all along, and slowly and surely people are starting to get the message and they're saying it is very, very apparent at this conference that you've been to over the last couple of days, just as the most recent example.

MW: And although true that IBM is relatively new to the water business or even just studying water, you have been doing some work on this type of water management around the world. And we've talked in the past about the great rivers project in Latin America. There's this Netherlands levy project. Tell me a little bit about what IBM is currently working on on the water front.

PW: So the thing we have going on on the water front firstly is you refer to the Great Rivers work as ongoing. I believe that's due to produce its first public deliverables either late this year or early next year. The work we're doing in the Netherlands is I'd say is around this project called ijk dijk, which is Dutch for reference levee, or calibration levee where we are instrumenting a levee which has been deliberately broken. We monitor it remotely, and this is the new news because a lot of the monitoring is traditionally done through a hard drive mapping in a shed somewhere onsite. We monitor the thing remotely.