Rounding up the Green IT figureheads

Anyone involved in the IT industry will, or definitely should have, a view or opinion on the Green debate.

IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and VMware were among those represented as CRN gathered the channel’s most significant commentators at Sydney’s Kirribilli Club last month to discuss all that is Green.

To frame the morning’s discussions, Philip Allan, research manager for vertical markets at IDC, kicked off proceedings with a short presentation on the facts and figures around the Green IT issue. Allan touched on the reality versus hype debate, the CIO agenda and the need for action items in the industry.

Highlighting IT usage in Australia, Allan said there are 14,773,685 desktops, 6,960,108 laptops and 483,547 servers in Australia. Also pertinent is the IDC claim that roughly 50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of new computer hardware.

“We look at Green across a variety of dimensions. In terms of defining Green IT, a whole load of analysts got together and the idea of our definition is that it covers the entire lifecycle. This is from design and the manufacture, the use and then right through to retiring,” said Allan.

“In terms of the size of the problem and actually identifying its nature, companies in Australia spend around $30 billion a year on all aspects of IT. In terms of our contribution to emissions in the region, Australia is around 20 per cent of Asia-Pacific and around two per cent of global emissions,” added Allan. “Are people interested in Green? Yes. Why are they doing it? It is about cost.”

Wright: The Federal Government is mad keen on finding innovative ways to meet two issues. The first is greenhouse gas. With the signing of Kyoto, they’ve nailed their flag to the mast. The other issue is cost savings. The big role we can play going forward is understanding virtualisation and energy savings. As an industry we need to come up with innovative ways to meet both the cost issue and the environment issue. This is one of the key challenges going forward.

Dickerson: There is a lot of talk about cost reduction, but an interesting piece of information would be how much more people would be willing to pay to go Green?

Allan: We have looked at that. We have those results and they are a bit disappointing. For around 500 respondents across APAC, Green was very much a priority. Are they prepared to pay a premium? At this stage, no.

Wright: It would be a very brave response for someone to put up their hand and say they don’t care about the environment. Everyone wants to go Green, but I’m not sure how much they are prepared to pay.

Dickerson: An interesting piece of information to get back would be how much [people are willing to pay]. Is it two per cent? There will be a sweet spot and that would give resellers, vendors and everyone else an idea on how hard they could go in terms of pursuing the Green angle as they would know how much people are prepared to pay.

Allan: A question I have for the vendor community is, do you think that it should be baked-in to the price? If you can make your product Green then you should.

Johnson: As a vendor we can provide an efficient product which ties in nicely with reducing cost and complexity. As an industry we can do a lot.

Dickens: We have done a bit of a study where we looked at 800 IT purchases about a year ago. 280 of those were in Asia-Pacific. We found that 44 percent of respondents said they would pay a premium [to go Green]. The question of how much of a premium they would pay depends on what product it is.

Walters: Just on the point of should it [Green] be part of the price or should they pay a premium? What we are seeing at Ingram, distributing a number of vendors, is that there is a difference with the enterprise-level price sets. This is because the total cost of ownership allows you to provide a solution which includes being Green. At the volume end of the scale people are not prepared to pay extra.

Mayhew: If you think about the price per piece, there is the price of the device and there is the running cost of the device. Users should be prepared to pay more as they can save money down the line. That is a hard thing to sell in the volume business, but the opportunities are there. For example if you are a PC manufacturer you could start saying that the cost of the device is this. The electricity costs of running it is this. The total cost of the device and running it over four years is this versus something else which is not Green.