Driven by the advances in hardware technologies, smart environments (or “pervasive computing”) already penetrate many spaces
of our daily live. Smart Homes, Smart Buildings and larger ensembles like airports, hospitals or university campuses are already
equipped with a multitude of mobile terminals, embedded devices as well as connected sensors and actuators. Some activities
already envision the “Smart City” which uses the opportunities provided by pervasive computing technologies to the benefits
of their inhabitants. In such a setting, smart environments are expected to play a crucial role for coping with the challenges
of urbanization and demographic chance e.g. regarding sustainability, energy distribution, mobility, health or public safety/security.
While “smartness” is often centered on a user perspective, we give the business perspective of a large industrial supplier
of infrastructures and solutions. This includes application scenarios for smart cities and an outline of the involved business-
and research challenges. A particular focus will be the setup and energy efficient operation of smart infrastructures and
data centers. While “autonomic computing principles” like self-configuration, self-healing, self-protection, and self-optimization
are well understood for enterprise IT infrastructures, their application to highly-distributed, heterogeneous pervasive computing
systems is less straightforward. A particular concern is the incorporation of energy efficiency in such settings. This involves
a reduction of the rapidly raising IT energy costs and concepts for making software applications and services more aware of
their energy consumption. It is therefore the basis for the identification of IT energy hotspots in software and IT system
architecture and therefore for a sustainable development and operation of smart environments
Keywords Smart Cities - Pervasive Computing - Sustainability - System Management - Green IT - Cloud Computing - Platforms - Infrastructure