ON BUSINESSES GOING GREEN

SOONER OR LATER?

The technology industry, especially the enterprise-focused hardware companies, have been doing their utmost of late to re-tool their products and services for the perceived holy grail of new, "green" markets.  An example of this is IBM's Green project initiative launched in the middle of last year:

"In May this year the firm launched its $1bn Big Green Project campaign focusing on ways it could reduce energy consumption.

Technologies which IBM touted last month included liquid cooling solutions, virtualization systems and power management, all of which it hopes to integrate into the new facility.

Data centres have been notorious for consuming vast quantities of power, as well as pushing out large chunks of carbon emissions to keep the beasts ticking over."

You may have seen several commercials IBM has been running to convince it's target market, the enterprise CIOs (Chief Information Officers), of the merits in investing in "green hardware, software and services.  This one is a good example:

It's an uphill climb, as other companies in the industry with similar recent initiatives, like Dell, have found.  This piece in the Register yesterday is a case in point:

"Dell has admitted it won't earn much return on the energetic greening of its operations and products, until CIOs get paid to have greener data centres.

Michael Dell, Dell's founder, chairman and CEO, said in a briefing with journalists in London today, that the underlying interest in green matters is growing at a fast pace.

But he added: "CIOs say the energy cost is 'not in my budget'."

That means that Dell, after a breakneck rush to green its product range, is offering products to CIOs who do not yet have an incentive to buy them.

Dell thinks "this is changing. CIOs are being held accountable." Asked if, when CIOs do get an energy budget responsibility, Dell would be there waiting, he said simply: "Yes."

These markets take a long time to turn around to new trends and opportunities.  Here's hoping in this instance that the market catches up with the vendors some point soon.

Comments

[greenskeptic]

It took about 10 years for the building sector to catch the green wave and now it is wrapping itself up in green at almost every turn. It will take a bit longer for the markets, banking, investing to catch up. But I'm convinced it is the game changer of this century and we are at an inflection point. The key is to prove and demonstrate that money can be made or saved, but over a longer time horizon than a few quarters -- and begin to account for externalities.

[Alex Tolley]

It will in the end, be about costs - whether direct fuel costs or carbon offsets as taxes/permits/limited operations.Today fuel costs are still a very minor part of the cost equation, but that is changing. Note your own post about Google considering putting data centers on ships (they are already being sited near hydro-power, like aluminum smelters). You might think that computer rooms would be contributing to the heating of buildings by now, but no, they just consume A/C at all year.