Pragati Verma, February 9, 2009
The Financial Express
Greenbucks continue to go to green technologies even as tech spending hits a rough patch. Governments from China to South Africa to the US to Japan will showcase their commitment to smarter, sustainable infrastructure, as corporates like Google and GE team up to develop advanced software and hardware for smarter electrical grid infrastructure.
Forrester Research senior vice-president, Chris Mines has been leading the charge in advising several of them on environmentally responsible computing. He works with strategists and marketers at global technology suppliers, helping them embrace the increasing importance of environmental considerations in the IT industry. Chris has led Forrester’s overall US research organisation from 2002 to 2006, with responsibility for setting the firm’s research agenda, budgeting and staffing, and developing research methodologies including the Forrester Wave and Technographics. As he gets ready to advice Indian IT leaders at the Nasscom leadership summit, he describes the green IT infrastructure landscape. Excerpts:
Most CIOs today equate green IT with data centre efficiency. Do you expect this to spread to other tech applications?
Yes, most of them tend to overfocus on data centres as a pricing centre of energy consuming activity. It is top-of-mind for most people because problems like growth or power capacity limits, and returns like energy cost savings, are highly tangible. It’s easier to see and feel the heat there all the time. They don’t realise that they consume as much energy on their distributed IT infrastructure.
The energy usage and efficiency of desktops, laptops and printers is harder for companies to measure, and harder to control, than the concentrated and tightly managed IT assets in the data centre environment. Capabilities to help the client IT organisations improve PC and peripheral energy efficiency are considerably less common among green IT services providers. This involves employee behaviour, where you have to get employees to switch off PCs—a much tougher task for companies.
Can a slowing economy derail efforts to make IT operations more efficient and less environmentally harmful?
Worldwide implementation of green initiatives in enterprise IT organisations and their suppliers will accelerate in 2009, notwithstanding the gloomy economic environment. A slowing macroeconomy is actually a positive for corporate efforts to make their computing operations more environmentally responsible as companies realise that doing right by the environment aligns with doing right by the business. A greener IT infrastructure is also a more efficient, lower-cost IT infrastructure because of the direct alignment of environmental improvement and cost efficiency in green projects like power management, virtualisation and consolidation of IT hardware, and recycling of old IT systems. Such green IT activities bring concrete, measurable cost reductions and thus will become more broadly adopted in enterprise IT organisations.
While constraints on capital availability could act as a brake on big-bang green IT initiatives like new data centre builds, the net effect of recession and resulting cost-cutting will mean a greater emphasis on green IT initiatives. Green IT will spread in several dimensions: from hardware to software and services; from data centres to distributed IT to IT-enabled public infrastructure; and from energy efficiency to life-cycle accounting of IT’s carbon footprint. However, capital intensive projects like new data centre build-outs won’t happen.
Push to green seemed to get stronger as oil prices were skyrocketing. Do you expect greening to slow down as oil prices dip?
Yes, it would definitely have an impact, as cost savings is an important driver. You cannot build as compelling a case at $45 per barrel as at $145 per barrel.
However, green momentum would be difficult to stop now, as it is too deep.
Awareness and adoption of green IT seems to vary a lot from country to country. Does size of company also make a difference?
In our studies, we have found no meaningful difference between adoption of green technologies by companies of different sizes. Energy industry and government organisations are typically ahead of the pack. It’s not just the traditional polluters but even banks, retailers and utilities are getting conscious of their green credentials, as customers start appreciating environmentally responsible companies.
Europe tends to lead because of regulatory policy and environment. UK, in particular and other countries in Nordic region, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have legislations and regulatory environment in place. The US tends to trail Europe by about an year and Japan trails the US. Among emerging markets, adoption varies but South East Asia, India and Eastern Europe are next but behind Japan.
Barack Obama and Congressional leaders are preparing rapid legislation to cut US emissions that cause global warming and to kick-start a clean energy revolution. Do you expect US to overtake soon?
Yes, we are seeing a lot of speculation on how economic stimulus package will result in greener America and create several green jobs. Many suppliers are keenly following that and are already showcasing their capabilities and projects. But it won’t be so immediate. Obama administration will take a close look at what EU has done. It is likely to raise visibility of carbon accounting, audits and monitoring of these. The US will take three to four years as carbon accounting is not yet there on planning horizon.
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