Green IT… The best kept dirty little secret
Earlier this year, I served on a panel on Green Business. Given that we’ve been providing core infrastructure for over 20 years, I tried to articulate how information technology can be a major contributor to “going green”. There were a lot of highbrow concepts bantered around with words like “virtualization”, and “consolidation”, and notions of ecology, natural resource preservation and government incentives. What it all boiled down to was anything that reduces energy consumption or generates less heat will save you money and start you down the lush Green IT path.
So who’s buying Green? It turns out that most businesses we deal with are more concerned with cost containment and improving the bottom line. Given this economy, how can anyone argue with that? It’s a big order to keep everyone gainfully employed and practice the Doing-More-With-Less exercises. The dirty little secret is that the technologies that fulfill on positive bottom line impacts are also the same ones that are being touted for Green IT. Insightful business decision makers are, in many cases, converting over to the Green side of the street, AND exercising masterful decision making skills that save them money and improve their ability to compete.
So what’s the lesson? Simply put – going Green makes sense for business, and businesses are wise to focus on being Green. The hard part now will be breaking the news to the business decision makers.
-Tim Krueger, PEI
