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We caught up with Jonathan Steel, chief executive of technology analysts The Bathwick Group. On 13 and 14 March Bathwick will be hosting the first European Green IT Summit and Awards at the Sheraton Hotel in London's Park Lane.
There will be sessions on the state of green IT, greening people and processes, building business cases and avoiding greenwashing. Speakers include Martin Blake, head of CSR at the Royal Mail; Stephan Singer, head of European climate change and energy policy unit at the World Wildlife Federation; and John Doyle, sustainable development policy co-ordinator of the EU Information Society.
Read on for Steel's take on the state of green IT and energy consumption.
Stewart Baines: There's much talk of greening the supply chain. Can this be extended to IT? And is outsourcing a viable strategy for cutting your own carbon footprint?
Jonathan Steel: The problem is that there are currently no standards for energy or CO2 emissions measurement in IT. The metrics that are being bandied around are quite inconsistent. If you are looking to green your IT supply chain you will probably have to do the energy reduction calculations yourself. Even if you can find out the energy consumption of a server in California, how much energy is used transporting data between London and California?
Eventually there has to be a simplifying mechanism to measure all this. The US has finally begun to understand energy conservation in IT and businesses, partly because of energy security concerns. I believe they will now take the lead and be responsible for defining IT energy consumption standards after years of denying there was a problem.
SB: How can you green IT if you can't measure its true energy consumption? Will we ever be able to measure the energy used by individual IT users?
JS: Eventually-- it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man. But at the moment you have patchy monitoring of data centres where it's all enclosed and quite easy to measure.
Imagine how difficult it is to measure in a distributed environment -- network routers, servers, PCs spread all over the world in different environments like offices and homes. Getting a power per user figure is very difficult but it will come; it's inevitable. The total cost of ownership (TCO) business philosophy has helped us figure out cost per seat so the same will happen with energy consumption per person.
SB: Application virtualisation and server consolidation are often viewed as one and the same as green IT. Are these having a major impact?
JS: Virtualisation and application consolidation have been around for years but now we have a green label on it because it's an easy way to cut energy consumption. But a lot of companies are still struggling with the practicalities, such as the difficult negotiations around software license adjustment.
A lot of larger companies don't really understand where the workloads are. They do the consolidation and virtualisation and find out they are still running the same amount of servers they were before. This in itself is a challenge, never mind trying to work out the energy consumption metrics.
SB: Software as a service (SaaS) should also be reducing the footprint of IT. Are you seeing this happen?
JS: Anything that involves shared resources is good from the green perspective. But cultural issues have held backed SaaS. Pay as you use software should be attractive to small businesses, but they also like to buy once and not get into an endless rental model. The real green impact will come when there is true cloud computing. You could save a massive amount of energy by getting rid of PCs and replacing them with very thin clients.
SB: How would you characterise the state of green IT?
JS: There is lots of evidence that green IT projects are stalling. There is a lack of buy-in from senior management because it was not clear what savings they were going to make or how they would do it. Our experience talking to businesses about green IT is that they don't understand it. Reality today is that less than ten per cent of companies know how much energy their IT is consuming.
SB: Can businesses take green IT seriously when too many still don't see the value in IT?
JS: Too many business people still see IT as a technical issue. They regard it as an expense. They get the classic IT-business disconnect and waste large amounts of money on IT, but still don't get the results that they should be getting. If green is the best way to force these business leaders into more effective use of IT, that's fine. They will make their companies green, they will cut their costs and they will add considerable business value. Green is a lever to get companies to do what they should have been doing all along.
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