Climate change and its impacts worldwide are a major concern in today’s society, and technology has been used to combat it. The oldest weather service in the world, ZAMG, a national meteorological and geophysical service in Austria founded in 1851, is gathering data and analytics to participate in this battle as well.

“What we are looking for is how can we combine data to stop this climate change,” said Günther Tschabuschnig (pictured), chief information officer of ZAMG. “How can we show other leaders, politicians, etc., how to stop it? How can we work against it? And how they can cooperate?”

Tschabuschnig spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the SUSECON Digital event. They discussed ZAMG’s work to combat climate change, its partnerships on this journey, how ZAMG integrates new technologies into its process, and the new role of the companies’ CIO. (* Disclosure below.)

Cooperation is key

In its fight against climate change, ZAMG partners with major enterprises, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise and open-source software company SUSE. The objective is to combine resources, energy, storage, knowledge and data, according to Tschabuschnig.

ZAMG obtains its data from two large data centers in Austria — which operate about 20 petabytes of data and 100,000 data sets per minute — and an additional smaller center more than 3000 meters above sea level in an observatory in the middle of a glacier.

“We are also using a lot of supercomputers. We do simulating. We do a lot of AI. We did big-data analytics. And, the most important thing, we do a lot of cooperation with the people that are out there,” Tschabuschnig explained.

While in the beginning, ZAMG served kings and theirs wars, the organization now mainly focuses on meeting demands related to sports, production, logistics, and other human needs, such as facing climate change. “Our most important thing is customer-first, so we try to produce our full costs, our integrated processes, especially for the customers,” Tschabuschnig pointed out.

To incorporate innovation in the development of its services, ZAMG works with two groups of professionals and separate data centers. One team is responsible for traditional and stable processes, while the other focuses on new technologies, including containerization, blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Tschabuschnig admitted that the first two weeks of the process did not go well: “One guy wanted to have the innovation and … the other one said: ‘No, stop, we have to be stable,’” he explained. “After four weeks with a lot of maintenance … and with a lot of guidance, they started to love each other because they [realized they could] learn from each other.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SUSECON Digital event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SUSECON Digital. Neither SUSE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Günther Tschabuschnig