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: 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 to Pragati Verma. 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...
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