PM Network - April 2009

thebuzz

Global research firm IDC also found growing interest in green IT projects in its December 2008 Green IT survey of more than 1,500 global business executives in 10 countries.

As in the Forrester survey, executives saw green IT projects as the best strategy to reduce rising energy costs. More than 70 percent of the respondents identified energy concerns as the number one driver for implementing green IT projects, with 77 percent of U.S. respondents and 74 percent of European respondents putting it at the top of their list.

“The cost savings associated with reducing power consumption is definitely capturing the attention of IT decision-makers around the world,” says Vernon Turner, senior vice president, enterprise infrastructure, consumer and telecom research at IDC.

The survey also shows that Europe is lagging compared with other regions when it comes to senior management interest in and customer demand to invest in sustainability projects.

But regulatory pressures and soaring energy costs could drive change.

“Last year, € 1. 6 billion was spent on powering servers throughout Western Europe, which translated into € 4. 4 billion for entire data centers,” says Nathaniel Martinez, program director, European enterprise servers at IDC. “Unless a drastic change in products and company practices occurs, things will not get any better in the future. In 2012, we could face a scenario where for every euro spent on buying new servers, more than €0.80 will be needed to power the existing data center infrastructure.”

FORCED GREEN

Green data storage was among the biggest trends in 2008, writes Lauren Whitehouse, analyst at U.S. research firm Enterprise Strategy Group in a Tech Target ANZ article in January 2009.

“Social responsibility has been less of a driver than the power, cooling and space efficiency challenges forcing ‘green’ initiatives in companies of all sizes,” she writes. “These initiatives aim to reduce costs, improve the environment and create new business opportunities by eliminating waste, conserving energy, reducing carbon footprints, and taking new approaches to the development and marketing of products and services—often relying heavily on IT to help meet goals.”

And not even the dismal economy will be enough to derail the move to green IT, according to one IT guru.

“There is no doubt that organizations are reducing IT investments in light of the economic downturn. Many have argued that the reduced price of oil and economic pressures will kill the green movement. The death of the green movement in organizations and society has been greatly exaggerated. However, there will be some changes in green IT investment

activity,” Lewis Curtis, infrastructure architect and advisor at Microsoft, said in a December 2008 Info World article.

“Environmental sustainability projects that positively impact the bottom line in the short run will be moved to the front of the line,” he predicted, while those that increase costs or don’t impact immediate regulatory needs will be delayed.