IDC: Green IT initiatives driven by business value 12 April, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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A survey of IDC Green IT Forum registrants found that 68 per cent of respondents rate energy efficiency as top of mind when thinking about green IT, with 51 per cent saying their organizations' approaches to green IT was directly related to cost savings.

"We can talk about green technology and what we want to do with that, but unless it actually does save us money and is driven by the cost of energy itself, it's going to be further down the priority list of things to do," said Vernon Turner, senior vice president of enterprise infrastructure at IDC.

When asked if they had a budget in place for green IT or corporate sustainability, 78 per cent of the respondents responded in the negative. Compared to a similar survey conducted in September just before the economic downturn kicked in, there have been some changes in the way organizations think of green technology.

"The change from where we were back last year to where we are now [makes it] clear the impact on the economy has challenged this as an initiative, but if you can prove it's going to save money, it's going to have some impact," Turner said.

The adjustment in thinking has to do with a shift from considering green IT in terms of standalone projects to what IDC calls the "business value of green IT," he explained. Instead of worrying about standalone projects like virtualization or server cooling, thoughts around green IT have become more complicated. It's now an integrated message of keeping the quality of service up, reducing costs and carbon avoidance. Combined, those three elements create the business value of green IT, he said.

Green IT is being talked about as a solution rather than a point offering, Turner said.

"It has to be an integrated strategy here," he said. That kind of thinking really resonates with CIOs.

When the economy picks up, though, the old ways of thinking won't resurface, Turner said. The days of running a server all night long in a way that's not cost-efficient are over. By 2012, the energy costs to run a server on an annual basis will equate to about 70 per cent of the server's purchasing costs. That's a big change from when it was just a few percentage points and seemed like pennies to IT departments. It is and will increasingly be a major expense that can eat into the IT budget, he said.

This means green IT, including virtualization, consolidation, datacenter consolidation and others, will help to make the shift away from monolithic datacenters that organizations have been used to in th past, Turner said.

"In difficult economic times, businesses are faced with rising energy costs and forced to squeeze the most amount of compute power out of valuable datacenter real estate in the most efficient manner possible," Turner said. "It's becoming more and more critical for technology users and providers to understand the linkages between environmental sustainability and profitability, and to leverage that information when developing overall business strategies. To that end, the business case for green IT has never been more important."