According to an interesting piece over at ARN, Green IT is still viewed as 'more for tree huggers' or 'warm and fuzzy'. Although this kind of headline does amuse me a little it does highlight an important underlying issue that still seems to plague this so called world of Green IT.
Green and sustainable IT is becoming increasingly important for businesses but some organisations still view it as a hippie craze, according to IDC Asia-Pacific research director, Phil Carter. At HP’s Eco Solutions Awards ceremony, Carter brought up statistics from IDC’s recent Green IT survey of over 200 IT executives and large organisations. Cost of energy remains a primary driver for adoption of Green IT solutions with 61 per cent of respondents confirming this.
It seems that Green IT (Or Sustainability to give it a more sensible name), is emerging but is still not at the core of what companies do.
“There is a two-fold scepticism and first of all, there is the question of how it will impact a company’s bottom line,” Carter told ARN. “Second of all, to some extent, the concept is a little bit out there as in some still think it’s warm and fuzzy; more for the tree-huggers."
I must say I groaned a little when the term Green IT first started to appear, as I knew right away that all of the negative 'tree hugger' and 'eco-hippy' trivialism would immediately be associated. But it was inevitable really. Any phrase including the word 'Green' is asking for it!
Seriously folks, why do we have to pidgeonhole everything anyway? Green IT is just a rather tired tag now for something that we've been talking about, working on, living and breathing here at 1E for over nine years. THe funny thing is that we never really saw it as being particularly Green, rather it just seemed to make really good sense to run you IT very very efficiently and in the process save lots of energy and money.
As the above article states, the underlying reasons for adopting so called Green IT strategies and projects remains the same. Cost. Energy cost in particular is the main focus for such projects, but also there's a general desire these days to simply run your IT more efficiently, and why not?
We're always producing case studies and great examples of how our customers are implementing Green IT projects across the world using 1E technologies. To us, the fact that those savings can now be demonstrated in terms of Carbon, Energy or good old Dollars and Pounds is just another way of slicing the cake.
Here's the bottom line. People have been striving to deliver great IT services as long as IT has been around. So I do thing that tags such as Green IT will come and go, and I'd like to think that this overt effort to be 'seen to be Green' will become second nature, like breathing. We need that to happen if our kids stand a chance of inheriting a planet in a reasonable state!
So to get things straight, lets just agree. Green IT isn't just for tree huggers, it's the natural way to do business. No more misleading labels please.
Long live Lean IT! Oops..