Julien Airaud

Symantec 2009 Green IT Report (pdf) has been published today and is 23 pages of fast reading. Scope is somehow ridiculous in Europe where all northern countries like Germany and Scandinavia were not included in the research scope whereas they are leaders on a lot of environmental and green initiatives in this region. Note that if you want to dive into graph’s details, you will need very good eyes due to compression.

It does not contain very valuable information if you already agree that yes Green IT is important (at least in your strategy and purchasing). It success is limited to interest in reducing running cost  and not really going further (reducing carbon emissions is third interests). That’s good to start with something, but this is only going back to a regular, lean situation where we should have been since the beginning.

I would love to see the question asked for some points:

page 8:

When asked how important a product’s energy efficiency would be in purchasing decisions over the next 12 months, 91 percent said it was important/very important. Only one percent believed that it would be unimportant.

I think they were referring to hardware purchasing and TCO. Even so, we already discuss on the necessary metrics to define efficiency in IT, embrassing both hardware and software world.

page 6:

Additionally, 92 percent of companies said they were somewhat/significantly interested in purchasing energy efficient hardware, followed by re-laying out the data center for more effective cooling and energy consumption (84 percent) and exploring alternative ways to generate power, such as solar/wind (70 percent).

page 10:

Companies are searching for the best ways to go about achieving their desire for green data centers. At the top of the list is an attempt to replace old equipment with newer, more efficient hardware (96 percent). Close behind are monitoring power consumption (94 percent), server consolidation (94 percent) and server virtualization (93 percent).

The hierarchy is clear again: server hardware will be changed for better one, achieving both green objectives and technological/renewal investment in one shot (in that case, it is not a green project, it is green washing). Long term investments, real projects, like for facilities and energy production will wait. The error comes from the point of view : hardware is not only the solution, software via control and measurement provides a lot of solutions. It is maybe the financial context that drives short term decisions and investments but I am wondering how many companies have a full GreenIT plan, containing both facilities and energy sources. The siloed organizations are producing siloed initiatives.  Having a study on collaborative, “Entreprise 2.0″ companies and their green initiatives would have some interests, especially for their scopes.

The good news is there:

page 9:

Finally, 81 percent of companies surveyed have a green advocate in charge of coordinating all green activities. Of those, most have an IT focus.