IBM unveiled its smart water portfolio of services and technologies today at the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey.

The smart water portfolio forms part of IBM’s larger Smarter Planet strategy in which the company intends to encourage the development of more intelligence driven societies by more effectively using instrumented and interconnected devices.

"Regardless of industry or geography, smarter water management is an issue faced by every business and government on the planet," said Sharon Nunes, Vice President for Big Green Innovations at IBM. "Without sufficient insight into near- and long-term factors affecting your water supply and usage -- complex issues such as access, quality, cost and re-use -- you increasingly run the risk of failure."

IBM also announced a water filtration breakthrough with the development of a new membrane which can more effectively remove salts and toxins from water supplies.

An excellent example of a demonstrable smart water solution in action is the SmartBay sensor system, which monitors wave conditions, marine life and pollution levels in Galway Bay, Ireland. The system, which runs on a cloud computing platform, provides real-time information to interested parties in the Irish maritime economy and is able to predict water conditions critical to those parties.

Clifford Foster, CTO at IBM South Africa, believes that the promise of a smarter planet offers South Africa, and Africa as a whole, the opportunity to leap frog the development processes that Europe and America followed by moving directly to the use of smarter technologies. While this won’t be a cheap process he believes that it will be far cheaper to implement these technologies while building infrastructures rather than having to overhaul infrastructures down the line, as the developed countries will have to do.