While much of the talk about Australia’s imminent carbon tax has focused on industry and consumer cost pressures and other negatives, for the channel it presents business opportunities.
“From a channel point of view it’s like a storm in a teacup with the sea being carbon,” said Gartner IT channels analyst Neil McMurchy.
It would lead to more complexity for businesses, he said, which in turn presented opportunities for technology companies including resellers and integrators to
market solutions to better manage that complexity.
“Clearly increased reporting requirements lead to increased complexity which almost inevitably creates more demand for ICT stuff,” McMurchy said.
“I find it hard to see a serious negative from a channel business respective [from the carbon tax].
“Increased complexity generally leads to increased opportunity.”
But industry groups have raised concerns about the risks of a carbon tax adding expensive and obstructive layers of complexity on to business and employment contracts due to new uncertainties around cost and accountability.
What impact this has on tenders and contracts within the ICT industry, and the many contractors it employs, remains to be seen.
But as far as compliance with new regulations, Ovum research director Steve Hodgkinson says there’s money to be made in power conservation.
“We expect that the plan, assuming it proceeds to legislation, will lead to increased opportunities for companies that specialise in the software and systems needed to manage energy use efficiently and to report on compliance under the new carbon pricing arrangements,” Hodgkinson said.
The carbon tax is expected to reignite interest in green technology within the ICT market, an area which has languished for the past five years.
“Green IT was hot four or five years ago and suddenly became less interesting as the focus moved to reducing costs,” said Gartner’s McMurchy. “One would assume the carbon tax would accelerate it.”
Andrew Kirker, A/NZ sales director for APC by Schneider Electric said: “We expect to see a 30 to 40 percent increase in power costs which will see further acceleration in uptake of green technologies.”
The company is a leader in the market for power management solutions including uninterruptable power supplies. Although it is a mature technology it has seen important developments and improvements; companies with aged units could realise as much as a 10 percent improvement in power efficiency by upgrading.
Other technologies offer compelling opportunities to improve energy efficiency.
APC will later this year launch in Australia its Eco Breeze free cooling solution following positive demand in key markets including the US and Europe.
Free cooling refers to systems that use low external air temperatures to cheaply chill water.
The company also markets a range of date centre management software tools which it expects see growing demand for.
Data centre operators hope increased costs will encourage more businesses to outsource the function while also making them more likely to embrace solutions such as virtualisation.
“Virtualisation is a proven enabler for footprint reduction in data centres,” said Greg Leach, chief technology officer with Australian integrator Empired.
“Every new platform release from our virtualisation partners such as VMware and Microsoft is providing
more advanced power management capabilities at the virtualisation layer.” Leach expected to see increased demand for Empired’s FlexScale cloud infrastructure platform following the introduction of the carbon tax.
“This can potentially reduce or remove the requirement for an organisation to sink money into building their own data centre. Instead, the focus is on service providers to address Green IT for organisations to subscribe to.
The tax is expected to be a burden on locally hosted data centres and cloud services as they struggle to manage the increased costs for power and cooling relative to offshore rivals, a problem that will be made worse if the Australian dollar continues to trade high.
A recent report that the impending tax and Australia’s deep reliance on dirty, taxable energy sources had led global cloud services vendors to question the viability of setting up operations in Australia.
But the head of local cloud newcomer Ninefold said it was unfazed by a carbon tax and was pushing to develop a reseller program in response to strong demand for its services.
The company’s chief executive officer, Peter James, said it was “more of an opportunity than a threat. Our competitive pricing will be maintained.”
For those companies that have yet to massage their contracts to take carbon into consideration, now is the time.
Under change-of-law clauses, conceived to provide assurance to business parties, under a carbon tax they could easily be a prime source of disputes, uncertainty and even litigation.
For instance, tendering and contracts for services that consume lots of power, such as data centres and even major outsourcing contracts, could be greatly complicated by a carbon tax.
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