Technology takes a lead in cutting carbon

Technology takes a lead in cutting carbon
By Jessica Twentyman

Published: May 18 2010 16:39 | Last updated: May 18 2010 16:39


Compelling viewing: in an otherwise sluggish year for the IT sector, the worldwide market for videoconferencing technology grew 16.7% in 2009


IT teams have been battling to overturn the data centre’s reputation as a vast and inefficient contributor to the corporate energy bill and to its carbon footprint.

Widespread adoption of virtualisation technology – running multiple systems on each piece of hardware – has allowed big reductions in the number of power-hungry and under-utilised servers, which are replaced by fewer, larger machines capable of processing several workloads and operating closer to full capacity.

This has allowed many companies to report significant reductions in the amount of power and cooling needed to keep their data centres running.

But the transformation of IT from sinner to saint still has some way to go, according to Gary Hird, technical strategy manager at the John Lewis Partnership, the UK retailer.

As he and his colleagues have met – and even exceeded – their goals for data centre efficiency, they have started looking to other areas where technology can help reduce the company’s environmental impact.

For example, IT staff are working on transport optimisation and fuel monitoring, and are making improvements to the company’s demand forecasting system, with the aim of reducing food waste.

In a recent blog, Doug Washburn, an analyst with Forrester Research, an IT market research company, described how the scope of green IT is expanding: “While the industry’s initial and continued focus is on the data centre, organisations are realising they have bigger opportunities in distributed IT and, even more so, outside IT altogether.”

He pointed to Forrester data that show about 55 per cent of the IT department’s power use is consumed by other assets, such as PCs, monitors, printers and phones.

More importantly, he says, the IT industry is only responsible for about 3 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – making the case for using technology to reduce environmental impact across broader business operations compelling.

Forrester now distinguishes between “green for IT” (the effort to reduce the environmental impact of IT operations) and “IT for green” (the use of technology to drive sustainability beyond the IT department).

Videoconferencing is one early example of using “IT for green”. Visual collaboration – whether conducted via dedicated, state-of-the-art telepresence suites or simple desktop PCs or laptops equipped with webcams – has become commonplace, reducing travel budgets and miles travelled.

In an otherwise sluggish year for the IT sector, the worldwide market for videoconferencing technologies achieved 16.7 per cent growth in 2009 and is expected to grow from $1.9bn last year to more than $8.7bn in 2014, according to IDC, the analysis company.

“The videoconferencing market is in the midst of a transition – from meeting over video as an option of last resort, to an alternative that’s preferred over travelling,” says Jonathan Edwards, an IDC analyst.

Events such as the travel chaos in northern Europe, caused by volcanic ash from Iceland highlight the benefits.

Danske Bank, for example, avoided drastic upheaval in spite of having a team from its Danica life assurance group stranded with its CIO in Bangalore.

Using the newest of the company’s 17 telepresence suites across 10 countries, they were able to work “just as if they were back in Denmark”, says Tom Soderholm, Danske Bank’s head of collaborative user technologies.

The company began rolling out Cisco telepresence suites in May 2008, supplemented by PC-based e-meeting technology from Microsoft, as part of its wider goal to become carbon-neutral in time for the COP15 United Nations climate conference, held in its hometown of Copenhagen last December.

Replacing business trips with telepresence sessions, he says, has led to a 15 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from air miles since 2008.

Each month, Mr Soderholm meets colleagues in Danske Bank’s travel management department to calculate how many miles have been replaced by videoconferencing sessions – and then with colleagues in the social responsibility department to calculate the CO2 reductions achieved as a result.

“We’re now discussing replacing our corporate travel policy with a corporate meetings policy, where travel is only one option. Travel should be the last resort,” he says.

For other companies, moving goods, rather than people, is the priority.

At Kimberly-Clark, Peter Surtees, European supply chain director, has been working with the company’s IT department on a roll-out of transport management software to reduce the miles travelled by its haulage contractors delivering tissues, paper towels, nappies and other products from its manufacturing plants to retailers.

The system, from i2 Technologies, a US supply chain management software specialist acquired by JDA Software last November, has enabled the company to optimise allocation of delivery contracts to a wider range of smaller and niche operators.

“The more carriers we have, the more likely we’ll find a contractor with trucks scheduled to return empty from deliveries. If we can fill those returning trucks, there’s less ‘empty running’, and so fewer carbon emissions,” says Mr Surtees.

The company estimates that it is saving £1m annually in transport costs and securing more competitive deals from its expanded list of haulage contractors. It is reducing distances travelled on its behalf by 380,000 miles a year, with an annual saving of 540,000kg of CO2.

Analytical tools are also being used by IT teams. These enable them to measure energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions – a task that has so far been accomplished by manual effort and spreadsheets.

Big IT vendors are accelerating this process by adding environmental modules to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. SAP, for example, acquired carbon monitoring tools specialist Clear Standards in May last year; Oracle has teamed up with IBM to offer its own carbon monitoring product; and Microsoft last year launched its Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for users of its Microsoft Dynamics ERP suite.

“With the dashboard, we wanted to make it easy for companies to extract environmental intelligence from information that, in many cases, they already collect,” says Jennifer Pollard, senior product manager for Microsoft Dynamics.

Data from electricity bills, including units, quantity and price, might be fed into the dashboard directly from financial accounting applications. The dashboard is implemented on clients’ behalf by Microsoft’s global partner network.

In France, for example, André Krief, a manufacturer and distributor of kosher meat products, is working with Prodware, a local implementation specialist, to measure the water and electricity consumed in its manufacturing processes and its resulting carbon emissions.

Gilles Krief, the company’s managing director, says the aim is to use the dashboard to simulate the impact that using different machinery in its processing plants would have on overall emissions.

Other suppliers are suggesting software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a quick and easy way for companies to manage carbon. Cloud Apps, for example, was launched in April 2010 by Simon Wheeldon, the company’s director for the EMEA region and a former Salesforce.com executive.

While the company’s cloud applications aim to manage carbon right across the business – including IT, buildings, business travel, freight transport and so on – he sees an important role for IT in collecting data from different systems and ensuring its accuracy.

“Some of the data that companies will want to feed into Cloud Apps are readily available, in the form of half-hourly meter readings from utilities companies. But some of it is hidden away in core business systems in HR, finance and facilities management departments.

“Close integration and the help of IT staff will be needed to gather it all, in order to get the most accurate picture possible of a company’s overall footprint,” he says.

Edmond Cunningham, an IT and sustainability expert at PA Consulting Group, agrees: “IT leaders are in a unique position to reinvent themselves as green advocates or visionaries, and not just within their own departments.

“The knowledge around how to make green decisions is still not readily available in most companies and IT can play a role in providing the information and data required.”

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