gartner lists best green it companies at itxpo 2008

Analyst firm Gartner named the best environmentally friendly IT companies during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008 in Sydney recently.

Fujitsu, HP and IBM scored well in the Green survey carried out by Gartner in partnership with WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) to see which companies are best tackling climate change.

The survey revealed Fujitsu, BT, HP and IBM have a long-term environmental plan that shows a level of commitment. According to Gartner, they all showed they have a proactive program to make low carbon solutions a reality.

“We wanted to do two things, look at how the industries are operating their business from an environmental point of view and look at how they are developing their product services to exploit a low carbon economy,” said Simon Mingay, research vice president for Gartner.

Companies that failed to do well were Wipro, Nortel, Verizon, China Mobile and Lenovo.

A total of 15 ICT providers agreed to be tested for their environmental and
climate commitment.

Meanwhile, Dr Kevin McIsaac, advisor for virtualisation, desktop deployment and data centre infrastructure at analyst firm IBRS, believes it’s not just the hardware vendors that need to make inroads, user behaviour also plays a key role in executing a useful environment plan.

In his latest research titled “Greening Your Desktop Part I: Gather the Facts!” Dr McIsaac found that prehistoric misconceptions around IT are causing flawed decisions.

According to the research, a PC may consume 200 watts when it’s going flat out and PCs are in an idle CPU state for 90 percent of the time.

A typical machine in an idle state consumes somewhere between 40-50 watts. He found that one of the things that was stopping this idle CPU state was running a screen saver.

“So if you’ve got a complicated screen saver you’re probably running your machine at 100 percent and yes it really is running at 200 watts.

“When you look at this stuff, you find simple ways to save money. It’s
an education thing on both the IT side and the consumer side,” said Dr McIsaac.

In other Green news, Australia is set to have the largest piece of the Green IT services pie across Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) in 2007-2011, according to the latest forecasts from IT market research firm Springboard Research.

Overall, the entire region will grow from a small base of US$251 million in 2007 to US$2 billion in 2011 – a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 68.5 percent.

Australia will remain the key market in the space despite the fact that India and China are growing at a faster CAGR than Australia, but from
a lower base, the report found.

According to Springboard’s report, “Asia Pacific Green IT Services Market – The Budding Greens”, infrastructure services comprised the largest component of the market in 2007, but consulting services are highly significant in the Green IT services marketplace, and will reach a size of $546 million by 2011.

The report also revealed that the key areas of interest in terms of Green IT services are virtualisation, data centre management, recycling and enterprise-wide Green IT strategies.

From a competitive point of view, the report notes that HP (with EDS) and IBM have had success in developing and launching end-to-end solutions in the marketplace.

Other leaders in terms of speed to develop solutions as reported by Springboard include Sun, Dell, VMWare and Microsoft.

2008 at best companies data centre gartner green hardware it itxpo lists