Gartner names the best environmentally friendly companies

The research was carried out by Gartner in partnership with WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) and the results were announced at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008 in Sydney.

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

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

“The IT industry as a whole accounts for two percent of global emissions,” said Simon Mingay, research vice president Gartner.

“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,” he added.

The survey revealed Fujitsu, BT, HP and IBM have a long-term environmental plan that shows a level of commitment when dealing with their channel partners.

They all showed they have a proactive program to make low carbon solutions a reality.

The assessment was broken into five categories; environmental business, supply chain, carbon business, carbon delivery and carbon champions.

Gartner claims Nortel and Cisco have bland environmental policies, also, Nokia, Ericsson, Google, Nortel, Cisco, SAP and Wipro did not have an overall Greenhouse Gas (GHG) target in place.

“We wanted to help our clients understand which vendors are doing a good job and which ones are struggling and which ones would make good partners,” said Mingay.

“The research has already had an impact on vendors. They have looked at their framework and it has given them insights into their business.

“It made them ask questions that they didn’t previously ask and some have now made significant improvements,” he added.

The 15 companies that took part in the survey were Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Nokia, Nortel, SAP, Verizon, Wipro Technologies, BT and China Mobile.

According to Mingay, the current financial crisis creates an opportunity for ICT providers to become carbon leaders by delivering services that are low risk, cost effective and reduce carbon emissions.