Green IT: Why Mid-size Companies Are Investing Now

Cost savings are king in this economy, and when it comes to reasons for adopting green IT projects, that is truer than ever before.

In a recent survey of 1,000 medium-sized companies (employing between 100 and 1,000 people), IBM and Info-Tech tracked the adoption rates of nearly a dozen different green IT strategies, and found that by and large, practices that save money quickly are at the top of the list.

Of the top five practices, four of them are driven largely by cost savings: Printer consolidation had already been adopted by 57 percent of respondents, followed by PC power management at 53 percent, and storage consolidation and remote conferencing scored 52 percent each. The second most-adopted practice, at 56 percent, was IT equipment recycling.

“Out of all initiatives in this study, the success of IT equipment recycling relies not on a business case with cost savings,” the report notes, “but on a combination of environmental responsibility and regulatory pressures.”

The e-waste finding underscores a key element of the report: green IT is seen not just as a means to save money, but as a two-fer: saving money while reducing environmental impact. The report quotes one vice president as saying, “Cost cutting is important to every organization, let’s be real, but [our] philosophy as an organization is that we live in this world and we want to be good neighbors. With our new investments, we are doing both.”

The full list of it practices covered in the survey is:

• server virtualization and consolidation
• storage consolidation
• desktop virtualization
• existing server room upgrades
• new server room builds
• IT energy measurement
• PC power management
• printer consolidation
• remote conferencing
• telecommuting
• IT equipment recycling