Ovum: IBM ahead of the ‘green’ pact

According to Wilson, Big Blue launched its 'Big Green' project in May 2007. Since then, it claims to have helped more than 2,000 clients with initiatives to reduce their environmental impacts (as well as costs and IT complexity). Among other efforts, the vendor says it has recycled more than half a million tons of IT equipment collected from clients' data centers.

Last month, IBM announced new energy-management software, a major expansion of its energy certificates program (in which companies can earn and trade certificates for verified energy savings), and an energy benchmark to help clients establish organization-wide efficiency goals and measure their progress toward meeting them, claimed Wilson.

During this week, IBM announced new capabilities in its Tivoli systems management offerings that unify managers' views of data-center resources, IT services and energy costs; support automation and policy-based management for optimal power consumption as workloads change; and show managers what services are consuming the most power, how much they can save while still meeting service-level agreements, and what to do first.

“As important as these steps are, however, they only hint at the larger opportunity for the software industry, particularly enterprise application vendors, around the bigger problem of non-IT-related carbon output,” said Wilson. “Although much of the data required to manage energy consumption and carbon output isn't readily available - and may not be currently tracked if it is available.”

However he believes as carbon-reducing regulations proliferate, as utilities deploy more sophisticated metering and billing systems and as the building industry incorporates energy-related controls, as its customers will inevitably demand, this information will become much easier to collect.

“As that happens, enterprise applications are the logical vehicles with which to gather and analyse it. In a sense, adding green capabilities to enterprise applications amounts to an expansion of the governance, risk and compliance management capabilities that their vendors have been building for the last few years,” he said.

Wilson acknowledges that enterprise application vendors are stepping up to the ‘green’ plate - albeit slowly. “To the extent that they position themselves today as 'green' vendors, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and others are focused primarily on improving their own companies' environmental profiles - for example, by promoting telecommuting to reduce employees' vehicle miles and requiring that desktop computers be shut down when offices are closed,” he said.

Wilson claimed they are also listening to customers and defining 'green' solution requirements to build into future applications. “As this process unfolds, the enterprise application vendors inevitably will overlap with the systems management vendors (with IBM, at least, but with others as well, assuming they follow IBM's lead),” he said.

The systems management vendors may well be better established. It will be important for the enterprise application vendors to partner with the systems management vendors to make sure their applications can consume the latter's 'green' data and incorporate it into customers' overall planning, just as they would a change in raw material prices or market demand.

“The bottom line is that, despite the early focus on IT-related power consumption and carbon output, it seems clear that there will be a much larger opportunity in addressing the vast majority of power consumption / carbon output that has nothing to do with IT. It is this larger market for which software vendors should be positioning themselves to compete,” he said.

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