Green : A Trend No More

Till a couple of years ago when the conversation at any technology seminar
veered towards green IT, most solution providers would casually dismiss it as
just another fad on the horizon. Others considered it as an altruistic model to
be adopted by the big-ticket players as part of their corporate social
responsibility practices.

But as climatic changes became more pronounced all over the globe and as
depleting resources resulted in higher operating costs, partners started taking
more notice of green solutions. Being ecology-conscious had started to make
economical sense.

Market research agencies tried to capture this shift in perceptions through
various studies. IDC's latest Green Poll in the Asia Pacific region showed that
organizations in the developed economies were looking to integrate 'green
requirements' into 'requests for proposals' for procurement of IT products and
services. “In Japan for example, more than half (52 percent) of the
organizations surveyed indicated that this is already part of their procurement
process. The fact that this approach is still emerging in other countries
highlights the varied adoption with regards to 'Green IT ' in the region,” the
survey noted.

According to a Springboard Research released in December 2008, one of the top
10 trends that will shape enterprise IT in the Asia Pacific region in 2009
included cost savings that would help green IT projects go mainstream.

This is not surprising news at all. Another IDC study showed that by 2010 for
every $1 spent on hardware, 70 cents will be spent on power and cooling and by
2012 for every $1 spent on hardware, $1 will be spent on power and cooling.

As the numbers started toting up, it became evident to most partners in India
as well in the business that green was the way to go. Several of them like
Frontier Business Solutions, Team Computers, etc had a headstart over their
contemporaries. But now there are a lot more getting into the fray. This shows
that green is here to stay and in a big way.

So what is green?

Simplistic as it sounds there are different ways that people perceive green
IT solutions. Wikipedia describes green computing as the study and practice of
using computing resources efficiently. Its primary objective is to account for
the triple bottom line, an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for
measuring organizational and societal success.

Princy Bhatnagar, Director Office Business Group, Xerox India offers his
perception. “Green IT is all about a technology that reduces consumption of
fossil fuels or natural resources or natural bulk usage. It starts with
recycling of papers and using technology that can be recycled so that they don't
have to be buried and create waste that cannot be regenerated,” he said.

Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager-India and SAARC, Seagate calls going green
the hot new trend in the business world, which naturally filters down to the IT
department. “Implemented correctly, eco-friendly tactics can make company
operations more efficient and save the enterprise money. The goals of green IT
include minimizing the use of hazardous materials, maximizing energy efficiency,
and encouraging recycling and/or use of biodegradable products-without
negatively affecting productivity,” he added.

Sharad Srivastava, Director-Sales, India and South Asia, Western Digital
pointed out that green IT is a solution for the IT infrastructure which can
save, on an average, 40 percent power than the normal equipment. “It is true
that there is slightly extra cost at the time of purchase of green products but
these save in terms of actual consumption of power which is substantially high.
So the total cost of ownership is relatively lower as compared to normal IT
products,” he added. In fact, he felt that it makes sense to go green during
recession time also as these products start paying off from first month of
usage. “When customers see the financial gain they enjoy, they will be attracted
to these products. Therefore green is not hype but makes better business sense,”
he stated.

For N Jagannathan, of Fourth Dimension Technologies and KV Jagannath of
Choice Solutions, any solution that takes care of the pollution and saves energy
is a green solution. S Arunachalam, Business Head-Virtualization and Application
Delivery Solutions, Frontier Business Systems agrees with him. He stated that
any solution that has the capability of consuming low power while increasing the
space of profitability to the customer in terms of the value in business through
lowest price is a typical green solution.

Why green is good for customer health?

Green is good because it is the color of money. Clichéd though this may
sound it is true. The reason why most enterprises perk to attention when green
is talked about is because of the cost savings it is expected to herald.

Sanjiv Bhavnani of Vishesh Infotecnics noted that spending on green IT is a
concept that enterprises take depending on the total cost of ownership.
“Customers can spend extra while investing on green solution as it would only
benefit them for longer run,” he added.

vendors who have pledged their support to green computing

IBM unveiled Project Big Green in 2007, de dicating $1 billion annually across its businesses to increase energy efficiency with the launch of new products and services that will reduce data center energy consumption, resulting in energy savings of approximately 42 percent for an average data center. As part of this project, IBM is building an $86 million green data center expansion at Colorado where it will consolidate nearly 4,000 computer servers in six locations worldwide onto about 30 mid-sized mainframes operating on Linux.

Under its revamped PartnerOne program announced earlier in 2008, HP added Green Expressway, which provides partners with information specific to HP's energy-efficiency programs, the latest environmental news, industry research and more. Its entire personal workstation line also bagged a 'Gold' listing in the Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool, which reflected their energy efficiency. It also decided to double its global purchases of renewable power from under four percent in 2008 to eight percent by 2012. This is part of its goal to reduce energy consumption and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions from HP-owned and HP-leased facilities worldwide to 16 percent below 2005 levels by 2010. And this is where it is banking on utilizing diversified renewable energy resources at its facilities worldwide.

Last year, Sun announced its Eco Initiatives which included Eco Advantage Program (EAP) specifically for the channel. EAP offers partners Eco Assessment Service, which is a technical evaluation of data center energy use, cooling capacity, rack placement, air distribution and other environmental factors besides Eco Modeling and RoI Tools that help partners model multiple power, cooling and carbon savings scenarios. This further gets extended to Implementation Methodologies that help partners deliver more energy and cost-effective IT environments.

Practice what you preach seems to be Dell's mantra when it comes to going green. The vendor has decided to opt for a packaging initiative by increasing the sustainable content in cushioning and corrugate packaging by 40 percent and ensure that 75 percent of its packaging components are curbside-recyclable by 2012. Through these and other similar initiatives the company hopes to save more than $8 million over the next four years and eliminate 20 million pounds of shipping materials. This aside, it has announced the Greenprint Advisor, a free Web-based resource to help organizations access their green initiatives and prioritize future actions.

It introduced Energy Logic last year in a bid to create a consortium of leading vendors who could help IT and facility managers make decisions about optimizing energy use and minimizing critical resource constraints. Other vendors who partnered with them were Cisco, Dell, IBM and VMware.

Seagate has introduced three new hard drives for better efficiencies. The Momentus 5400 power savings drive uses non-volatile cache, or flash memory, to cost-effectively deliver the benefits of solid state disc drives. The Barracuda ES and ES.2 enterprise drives are enabled with PowerTrim technology, that draw minimal power when the drives are in an idle state. The Cheetah drives too are equipped with PowerTrim technology, which allows users to achieve up to a 40 percent improvement in IOPS/watt performance. The enterprise-level Savvio drives are 70 percent smaller than 3.5-inch drives, enabling more drives per system ensuring ultra-low power consumption.

Nortel is focusing heavily on its services-powered Telepresence Solutions, which it claims can reduce unnecessary carbon emissions by minimizing the need for business travel. It has armed itself with other green solutions including software tools like Energy Efficiency and Telepresence Return on Investment (RoI) calculators, which demonstrate how IT professionals can reduce network energy consumption. In fact, it had devised an energy savings credit program using these calculators to help enterprises gauge their power savings by using Nortel products and later credit customers that exact amount on their purchase.

Cisco introduced its Efficiency Assurance Program that helps enterprises to estimate their energy efficiency in their data centers and identify areas where it can be improved. This was jointly delivered by Cisco Advanced Services and some qualified partners who were strong in the data center business. Besides this, switches from Cisco were the first in the industry to be certified by Miercom, a network product test center and consultancy, under its 'Certified Green' testing program. It is also getting partners enthused about taking its telepresence solutions to the market, highlighting how these will help companies cut traveling cost and save on executive man-hours making them more productive.

The chipmaker announced its plans to purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours a year of renewable energy certificates as part of a multi-faceted approach to reduce its impact on the environment, making it the single-largest corporate purchaser of green power in the US. This is the environmental equivalent of taking more than 1,85,000 cars off the road annually, or avoiding the amount of electricity needed to power more than 1,30,000 average American homes annually.

AMD has formulated an annual Global Climate Protection Plan to reduce impact on the climate via energy-efficient products, sustainable manufacturing and operations, and corporate leadership initiatives. It first published this plan in 2001, and since then has managed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent till 2007. Within its product lines, it has attempted to bring better performance efficiency with reduce power consumption. A case in point is its Quad-Core Opteron processors have four cores on a single piece of silicon for more efficient data sharing which reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO), data center power needs, and cooling costs by lowering the energy consumption of the IT infrastructure.

Bhatnagar felt that green IT is gaining popularity because companies do not
want to spend on waste management and are concentrating on improving efficiency
as well. “If your company has 10,000 desktops and if you have to dump them in a
secure manner one has to look at adopting greener products. Thus it is not a
cost cutting activity undertaken but a business need of efficiency,” he noted
adding that in the current environment if enterprises need to grow then they
have to be more efficient in the way they use their resources.

But at the same time, very few enterprises barring the big players have
formulated a green policy for their internal purchases and operations. While
having lowered total cost of ownership is the end result of their expectations,
they have yet to put down a well defined policy for focusing on improving energy
efficiency of their IT infrastructure especially in the data center. Though
facing rising electricity costs they have yet to analyze with hardcore data the
energy savings they will enjoy over a specified period of time by opting for
green solutions.

This is another area where solution providers can step in. Most vendors have
already created return on investment calculators to help enterprises to
understand how their existing equipment is feeding on power and other resources
and how this can be controlled by putting green solutions. All this can be then
calculated on the monetary savings over say three, five or ten years to give the
companies an idea of the investment they were making at the onset and the
benefits they could enjoy over that period.

There is yet another good reason why solution providers should start taking
green seriously. According to the IDC Green Poll data, currently 18 percent of
the organizations surveyed in Asia Pacific considered the greenness of their IT
suppliers before making a selection and another 30 percent expected to do so in
the near future.

Are vendors doing enough?

It goes without saying that the awareness and adoption of green IT depends
on the maturity of the market. And Harald Werner, Senior VP-International Sales,
Rittal GmbH believes that India is at the time place when it comes to adoption
of green IT and other new technology solutions.

“From my experience I can say that Indian IT companies will absorb these
practices quicker because the Indian industry here is on the threshold of the
global IT technology. Also their dependence of technology is steadily
increasingly,” he noted.

But for this to happen vendors have to play a more active role in advocating
the adoption of green IT because in the end, that is what most enterprises
expect. So the recent spate of television advertisements from vendors like IBM,
the ante has been raised to get companies to realize how green will transform
their business. But a more concentrated effort is needed.

Said Bhavnani, “It's good to note that vendors are investing on green IT
seriously. They are promoting it as a concept which is not only not to promote
their brand but to rationalize the adoption of eco-friendly solution.”

The Year Of Green Tech?

With the power crunch, green tech will become a necessity for the tech industry and its customers-and an opportunity for solution partners India crosses over into a new year at an interesting, difficult, and challenging time. Its tech industry, and the influence and impact of its two million developers and tech and BPO workers, are on a high, and rising. The economy, facing a big squeeze from the global recession, struggles to keep growing. And a people known for their never-say-die spirit, entrepreneurship and jugadu streetside innovation, are reeling from a year of terror. In this new-year milieu, it may sound odd if I speak of green tech and power as major issues. But even if you ignore the fact that the top threat facing this 21st-century peace-era world is global warming, which has melted thousands of tonnes of ice, raised the mean sea level, and changed local weather patterns... ...you can't get over the fact that a major issue facing India, and its tech and other industries in this new year, will be power shortage. It's pushing up costs, limiting places small businesses expand to or families relocate to (in Gurgaon, so many families insist on an apartment with 100 percent power backup, and with good reason). It's also the main driver for green technology adoption in much of India: the cost of backup power, and business continuity. The channels in the past have ignored green, or viewed it with suspicion, equating it to environment concerns. That is changing, along with industry demand. Take the telecom sector, in which the top businesses like Airtel and Reliance spend thousands of crores each on energy costs, and are willing to invest hundreds of crores to save a part of this opex. Across our group of publications at CyberMedia, we're taking up a common focus in 2009 on green tech and energy efficiency: the need, products, solutions, opportunity. DQ Channels will focus on the opportunity that green tech provides for the channel and solution partners. And feature their success stories in implementing green solutions. While Dataquest will focus on the solutions and strategies for the enterprise, PCQuest will test IT hardware and software for power efficiency. All sizes of businesses are worrying about power. If a company replaces 500 monitors from CRT to LCD, there's a 25 kilowatt drop in the power draw when they're in use. And there's standby power: the business can save further, if the systems are set to go to standby in 10 minutes of non-use (and if they've bought energy-star rated monitors). So that's power savings of over Rs 5 lakh a year, plus capex savings in backup equipment. Customers would pay a premium, if they see the value. And finally, I need to hear about your challenges, questions, and answers, in our journey toward greener technologies. Have you implemented a major green project, or an innovative green solution we can feature? Do you sell a product that cuts power usage sharply? Write to me. Prasanto K Roy is President and Chief Editor, ICT Publications, at CyberMedia (pkr@cybermedia.co.in)

But Jagannathan of Fourth Dimension felt that the need of the hour is not a
piecemeal strategy in the way of offering a few green products, but a more
comprehensive product line. “Though vendors have few aspects like energy
efficiency in their products, they still haven't come out with a full fledged
green product line,” he noted. He agreed that there was also a need for
generating awareness among customers about the concept as well, which should be
created on the aspects of business impacts in going for green IT rather than
projecting the cost involved in opting for it.

Arunachalam at the same time is appreciative of the efforts that vendors are
undertaking in this regard. “Vendors are focusing a lot on the green concept
through various initiatives. It is slowly becoming reality from the hype as the
adoption has started to pick up which will improve over a period of time,” he
said.

But there is still a long way to go in this regard. There is still a lot of
confusion about green IT. Enterprises and CIOs have been inundated with a lot of
information about green products and solutions but they have not been offered
clarity about how these could be employed at their end and how it would benefit
them.

This is why vendors need to work closely with solution provider to dispel the
myths and doubts about green IT and help enterprises adopt it in a scalable
fashion, while showcasing how they can go laughing to the bank with the savings.
Because that is the one respite that enterprises need during recessionary times,
and need it most.

VINITA BHATIA

(vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in)

(With inputs from Amrita Tejasvi, Pooja Sharma and NR Sethuraman)