Opinion: the 'greenlight effect'

'I am constantly looking out for trends, tendencies, and technology best practices. In the past year, one trend has grown clearer every day: I call it the "greenlight effect".

This is the simple proposition that technology purchases that might not otherwise be approved in today's uncertain economic climate are "greenlighted" because the benefits of energy savings and the motivation to reduce carbon emissions overrule the economic woes.

Increasingly, organisations are becoming more sensitised about the energy efficiency of IT equipment. Energy consumption, electricity cost, and CO2 emission are the attributes that are greenlighting today's computing initiatives.

The greenlight effect is growing more pronounced and is the difference between technology initiatives that move forward and those that do not.

There are two main forces at work: the need to trim business costs combined with energy and climate concerns.

Business Cost-Cutting

The first departments to face the heat are almost always those that are not revenue-producing. Business IT, marketing, operations departments all have budgets at risk. IT departments, in particular, are being asked not only to justify new technology expenditures, but also the maintenance costs for their existing infrastructure.

They are accountable not only for how much it costs to purchase a single PC, but also how much it takes to maintain that PC. Think how many patches Microsoft publishes in a year and you get a sense of the maintenance challenges.

Energy and Climate Concerns

As energy costs continue to rise, businesses will turn down the lights, use more discretion with heating and cooling of offices, and they will look to IT departments to find ways to reduce energy consumption.

It is estimated that 15 percent of an organisation's energy costs and carbon footprint results from IT use, of which 39 percent is attributed to the use of PCs.

Governments are also leaning on businesses to reduce the impact of their carbon emissions.

The governor of the state of Louisiana, for example, has implemented a "Green Government" mandate that is designed to make state government more environmentally friendly.

When its Department of Revenue needed to upgrade its technology infrastructure, a 75 percent reduction in energy costs associated with virtual desktops was the primary driver in their deployment of virtual desktops.

Streamlined support costs and extending the lifecycle of desktop devices from today's range of four years to seven or eight years was important, but the economic decision was driven by energy savings.

At the 2008 May Day Business Summit on Climate Change, Prince Charles praised the recruitment company Reed for an 80 percent reduction of power use by replacing its PCs with thin clients.

Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, Scotland is combining energy efficiency and information technology in ways never before imagined.

The building design stipulated that the desktop computing platform should be limited to approximately 45 watts of power per device so that the working environment can be handled by natural ventilation.