Government goes Green

Sholto Macpherson

Australian governments are leading the charge on “Green IT” deployments and are forcing government resellers to overhaul their own practices too, said Tony Wright, general manager, government affairs at Cisco Australia.

While the SME market has been slow to adapt energy- efficient technology, climate change and its implications are “absolutely crucial” to government, said Wright.

Governments, with their attractively large purchase orders, have always wielded a fair level of influence over resellers through their tender requirements.

Governmental procurement processes are heading towards a baseline assumption of energy efficiency that will help set a new standard in the channel.

It is not enough to rebrand products with environmentally targeted messaging. Governments want to know what resellers are doing to reduce their own emissions themselves.

“Now you are finding more [government departments] are seeking more information about a company’s Green credentials and also a company’s social responsibility credentials.
Governments are not just asking what IT companies are doing for the customer, but what are they doing internally to alleviate their own footprint.”

In Wright’s opinion, the Green revolution is a big step away from the inwardly focused optimism of the dotcom boom.

Rather than a “build it and they will come approach”, the channel is experiencing a genuine push toward a more responsible and collaborative outlook to providing product and services, which includes community service as well as environmental awareness, he said.

Resellers need to ask themselves about the holistic value that their organisation can add to a government other than dropping switches, routers and phones.

“I think it’s gone past that. Governments are looking for greater levels of innovation from IT companies – I don’t mean inventing new products, I mean in crafting different ways to meet problems or assist in service delivery.”

Cisco has a dedicated “thinktank” which is responsible for dreaming up new ways of deploying technology and assessing best practice from governments and enterprise from around the world.

Wright said Cisco is no longer the company it was in the ’80s and ’90s, where departments lived in their own silos and jealously guarded their resources.

The company structure has flattened to give it the required agility to respond to client demand, he said.

This has helped Cisco take the Green revolution to heart and is a major focus for the whole organisation in its product development as well as marketing, said Wright.

“It’s not, ‘I want to go from four stars on my fridge to six stars on my fridge’. It’s not a fad, and I don’t think companies are treating it like that.”

The greening of IT procurement in Australia is a big opportunity for the channel.

Wright sees several potential big-ticket projects: the coming national emissions trading scheme will require carbon trading platforms, and travel reduction programs will hopefully spur on the web conferencing and telepresence market.

Wright (and Cisco) is bullish about the latter technology.

Telepresence is the big brother to video-conferencing – wall-sized screens, directional microphones and multiple video cameras attempt to create the illusion that two people are sitting in the same room, rather than floating heads in the corner of a computer monitor.

“The ugly days of early video conferencing – the granular pictures, the terrible sound quality, the large amounts of technical support to run a simple video meeting – those days are gone,” said Wright.

But the promised savings in travel behind the telepresence pitch sound eerily familiar to anyone who witnessed the dawn of video-conferencing five years earlier.

And yet the technology had a minimal impact on business travel which became cheaper as price-cutting budget airlines chased the corporate dollar.

Wright said one key measure is the utilisation rate within Cisco’s 140 sites around the world. Videoconferencing sits at seven percent while telepresence is more than 65 percent.

“I’ve always been of the view that if the experience of the technology is one of quality, and the technology is easy to use, then people will use it,” said Wright.

Instead of requiring hundreds of megabits of bandwidth, telepresence requires 10 or 12, “which is manageable across any robust infrastructure”.

But the extra realism of telepresence comes with extra costs.

Six-figure pricetags for multiple-location installations are likely to limit take-up.

Another game-changer is the impending national emissions trading scheme due to start in 2010.

Air travel is a highly polluting activity and could attract a sizeable penalty in the form of carbon taxes, which could severely constrict travel budgets.
If telepresence does take off, it will boost other collaborative technologies for sharing documents and data.

Government’s Green campaign is up for an interesting stoush with the biggest emissions culprit in IT, the data centre.

Data is growing exponentially, and the bigger the organisation the faster the growth.

In his farewell speech in June, Bill Gates said that Microsoft would soon expand from its “hundreds of thousands” of servers in its data centres to “many millions”.

While governments will never have to contend with a global user base the size of Microsoft’s, the federal government still needs to record details for more than 20 million users.

Wright said government is very keen to find efficiencies in power consumption in data centres through virtualisation, better cooling systems and airconditioning.

Wright is no stranger to Canberra.

Before Cisco he lived for 12 years in the national capital working in sales for media agency Associated Press’s press release and distribution network, Media Net.

The work was “great fun” – “I’ve always been an information junkie” – but he spent too much time around journalists, said Wright. “They drink more than shearers.”

Then there was a brief flirtation with telecommunications.

With four mates, Wright bought a telco in 1998, “in the times when that was a fashionable thing to do”. He worked as chief marketing officer for Usenet in more than 11 countries, a travel-intensive job that he gave up four years later to spend more time with his young family.

After selling his stake, Wright decided to take a 12-month sabbatical “to find myself”.

“That lasted about four weeks. I was just completely bored. For the first two weeks I just hit golf balls, and then for the second two weeks I thought about how boring it would be to hit golf balls for the rest of the 52 weeks.”

Scrolling through an online job site, Wright came across an entry for a marketing director with a government background – Cisco was looking for someone to run marketing in its government relations program.

“I thought, that’s ridiculous, you don’t find too many of those.”

Wright said there is much more involved in IT than in media or telco work.

“In the media space there is still an inherent desire to get the story out now. In a technology space they are very focused on the best way to distribute, the best infrastructure and architecture for my organisation. So it’s a much more involved process.”

Wright said he has noticed a trend towards closer relationships between resellers and customers which is particularly obvious in government.

In what could be read as a sign of maturation within the industry, larger customers are looking for partnerships rather than just the best price box-dropper.

This trend goes beyond government, said Wright.

“Larger enterprise organisations are looking for significantly more from their vendors. It’s not just product placement anymore.”

But how do you make and develop relationships with government?

One way is through public-private partnerships (PPPs), where governments share the cost and burden and revenue of public projects. A partnership means there is more likely to be “a mutual understanding of a common direction”, said Wright, who adds that he believes PPPs are becoming more common in tech rollouts.

“The country is littered with governments seeking to partner with organisations for the delivery of service, be they roads or ports or rails or broadband deployment. I think there will be a lot [more] emphasis on collaborative work between the two sectors than there was in the past,” said Wright.

“Governments aren’t interested in owning all the infrastructure anymore. I can’t recall the last [time] where they’ve funded a complete project on their own.”

As with many ideas, PPPs sometimes work better in theory than in practice.

Famous stuff-ups include Sydney’s recent motorways, such as the Lane Cove Tunnel, which could go broke next year.

The private operator has been forced to refinance after the NSW government overestimated the daily number of vehicles and concurrent revenue.

What is the risk of ending up with a tech version of the Lane Cove Tunnel on your hands? Wright said that while there have been some difficulties in software deployments, few mishaps have occurred with hardware.

Given the trend towards joint responsibility for IT projects, joint ownership of the gear makes sense, he said.

The PPP model “is the future of the industry”, said Wright.

A more hands-on approach by the channel means plenty more opportunities to be involved in other broader based initiatives.

“I’m excited about the industry’s opportunities to participate in climate change and environmental footprint, I think it’s a got a huge role there. I’m excited about the industry’s opportunities to provide assistance from a CSR perspective, where it can genuinely make a difference to enhancing the lives of those less fortunate than others,” said Wright.

“It’s a long way from the tech wreck where it was all about how big a purchase order I can raise. There are now significantly more responsible approaches being taken to IT deployment. It’s a good opportunity to do something for the next generation of Australians around IT.”