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Friday, August 7, 2009
Company cost savings still trump cleantech, alternative energy
By Jackie Noblett
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The recession may have taken a bite out of green projects in corporate data centers, but IT advisory firms say the topic of sustainability is still a significant part of conversations with potential customers.
Many of those discussions — while still resulting in more efficient computing systems and data centers — have shifted from cutting a firm’s carbon footprint to saving its operating dollars. Yet companies still want to know how green saving money is, whether or not that drives actual decision making.
“If you don’t have a green flag in the game, you’re going to be overlooked by customers,” said Richard Scannell, senior vice president of Glasshouse Technologies Inc., a Framingham IT consulting firm. “Yet the overall trend continues to be around cost reduction.”
The number of firms slowing down their green IT initiatives has seen a significant uptick, according to research recently released by Cambridge’s Forrester Research Inc. Of some 855 firms surveyed globally in April, 11 percent said they would slow down projects, compared with 5 percent in October 2008. Some 12 percent of companies said IT initiatives would be sped up compared with 10 percent in October; 40 percent said it was too early to know.
Susan Labandibar, CEO of Tech Networks of Boston, said while she has “never seen so many people interested in sustainability,” when it comes down to specific projects like virtualization of IT systems, money talks.
“We were focused on server virtualization in the traditional way these things were implemented. The problem is, it’s expensive. You’re talking about a big upfront cost and that is not working for a lot of people right now,” she said.
So Tech Networks is working with some companies in a slow rollout of the same technology, essentially using smaller servers and implementing virtual computers only when traditional systems reach the end of their life.
The same techniques are being used by data center efficiency consultants, who are being asked to cut power consumption.
“Because of the recession, a lot of the upper-level managers are looking at data centers as a way to cut costs,” said Adam Fairbanks, vice president of data center services at Norwell-based Bluestone Energy Services Ltd. “The bottom line is driving many of those decisions.”
Yet how companies go about making changes to data centers varies depending on budget constraints. Fairbanks said most companies are only replacing cooling systems if they are beyond their useful life, instead trying to adjust the airflow to only cool servers that are operating instead of cooling the entire room.
Glasshouse launched a service last month linking their IT optimization consulting service with an outside firm to offer a holistic view on data center efficiency.
“IT companies look at one side of the coin — product refreshes, consolidation, virtualization. What we don’t look at is the other side of the coin,” Scannell said. “Now we have this incremental data to show customers how their actions result in savings, and a reduced carbon footprint is icing on the cake.”
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