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The Greening of IT
84 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Companies will, however, push telecommuting if it helps them to retain
employees or cut office expenses. IBM has promoted telecommuting and has
had mobile employees for more than a decade. Many of IBM’s employees
work from home or wherever they are with today’s easy-to-use and secure
access to IBM’s secure intranet and the Internet. With wireless cards in lap-
tops, the need for an office is gone. This changes the need for employee com-
muting. With the higher cost of fuel, many employees welcome the option to
telecommute.
A reduction in car emissions is good PR, but it won’t drive many business
decisions. Green computing is on the radar screens of CIOs, but, as previ-
ously mentioned, it’s not primarily motivated by eco-friendliness. The pri-
mary motivation is more likely technology’s cost. The good news for Mother
Earth is that a lot of money-saving, eco-friendly steps are just waiting for IT
execs to take.

Where’s It All Heading?

The last three chapters on the need for collaboration, the government’s ptg
role, and the magic of incentive (rebates for efficient technology, ratings for
new equipment, and such) are all closely related. We all need to be in this
together; we need the federal government involved in all aspects of the envi-
ronmental crisis; and incentives along with energy-efficiency ratings will all
help us on the road to green IT. It’s also good to be continually reminded that
green IT is probably the best win-win direction for all companies to take in
the direction of becoming environmentally friendly. In the author’s experi-
ence, going green using technology such as virtual servers, virtual storage,
and energy management provides an excellent business case without even
considering energy-savings. That’s because IT technology is already being
refreshed every three or four years, and combining ten stand-alone physical
servers into one physical server using server virtualization immediately
reduces the capital cost for new servers by 50 percent or more. It also simpli-
fies your IT, making it more sustainable and easier to refresh. The 50 percent
additional ongoing energy saving due to server virtualization is just “gravy.”
The detailed virtues of IT virtualization are given in the next chapter.