How green is your business? Just look it up on the leaderboard!
It is always interesting to see another software vendor entering the power management space and I would encourage all IT users to use such applications as part of their strategy to minimise their CO2 emissions. So I was interested to see a post on the Green PC blog today reqarding new 'carbon control' software to be introduced by CCS, a software company from Scotland.
This new software achieves CO2 reductions by turning off computers when they are not being used and is thus a power management application similar to our own Powerdown product and a number of similar competing applications from other vendors. Where the CCS applications differs from existing power management applications is that it is backed by a social networking site. Information on how much a company has cut its carbon emissions is uploaded to this site and the site provides an at-a-glance view of which businesses are the most green. A social networking site that compares CO2 savings and publicly names the greenest is an interesting idea but I wonder how many businesses will really be that willing to have their 'green ranking' displayed in this manner?
I would take exception to CCS' claim that their product was 'the only one specifically designed with carbon cuts in mind'. Our own offering, and I suspect those of some other vendors, were expressly designed for this purpose. However it is difficult to persuade customers to adopt such products purely on an environmental basis. An interesting article in this week's IT Week magazine ('Departments pass green buck', IT Week, 7 April 2008) notes that 'increasing awareness of green issues has yet to be translated into much action... where firms had made green moves, their main motivation often had little to do with the environment... these technologies make their business easier to run'. This certainly corresponds with our own experience which shows that it is easier to sell on the cost saving aspects of power management than the attendant CO2 reduction which will accrue from using it. This is why we why (and probably other vendors too) mainly focus on cost savings when marketing power management software and hope to achieve the environmental benefit as a happy side effect.
The same article discusses the results of a survey of a number of IT firms which found that only 21% of businesses had a formal green IT policy and only 8% had fully implemented this policy. Given this low take-up rate of green IT technologies it will be interesting to see how many firms are willing to expose their green credentials to scrutiny the social networking site envisaged by CCS.
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