Sowing the seeds for a greener company
Why CIOs should look at this downturn to steer their organizations into a green patch
 With the drastic change in the environment emerging from being a statistic on a report to directly affecting the common man on the street, the drive for companies to shift to energy efficient systems and adapt green practices is a business imperative and not putting their money down on a “concept” technology. Recessions or an economic downturn for the want of a nicer word, bring out a very peculiar trend. After a continuous period of pessimism on the gloom and doom that surrounds it and when a bottom is hit, the upswing begins.
It’s not like companies have drawn up plans to transform their operations to adhere to the environment friendly guidelines in the past year. Most socially conscious organizations, for example, the Tata Group with a focus on TCS have a definite strategy in place. Their Green Computing strategy explores and adopts eco-friendly options which is implemented internally as well as they offer a consulting service on the same for their client organizations. With a buy in from the top management, corporate functions such as Research & Development, IT, Facilities, Corporate Communications and HR play an important role to ensure that the company enforces its strategy.
CIOs looking for ROI
In spite of the economic climate, CIOs are not averse to buying new technology, products and services. As part of the study conducted by Network Computing-Infrastructure Agenda 2009-clearly shows that Achieving Cost Efficiency or Increasing Productivity has been rated as the top business priority by 7 out of the 8 sectors covered. Among them, Achieving Cost Efficiency is polled by the overwhelming majority. This is definitely indicative of the troubled economic times of today where companies are concentrating on keeping the bottom line as low as possible.
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RadhaKrishna Pillai
CTO,
SRL, Ranbaxy
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“This is the right time to buy only if the technology requirement justifies the ROI because we can get the best rates from vendors. But if you are investing just for the sake of having one more technology then this is not the right time to do it. During the slowdown vendors are eager to do business with everyone irrespective of the size of the deal. So even if we have a small budget for IT investments, we can get a better deal on both price and other add on benefits like extended warranty, staggered payment to some extent, better service support etc,” says Radhakrishna Pillai, CIO, SRL Ranbaxy. |
Arun Gupta, Group CTO, Shoppers Stop is quite curt in his response. He believes that investments in new equipment and technology during a slowdown will only make sense if they fulfill any of the following purposes, namely Create operational savings as compared to status quo; Add a capability which helps in improving the top-line or bottom-line; and Provides a differential capability as compared to competitors. He adds, “It has to fulfill any of the above criteria, else we will desist from investments.”
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Ajay Dhir
CIO,
JSL Ltd.
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“Most of the IT investments are on hold in a majority of the organizations. But still, the CIO with whatever little budget he has at his disposal can take a judicious call for investing in new equipment or technology projects which would bring about process improvement on one side and on the other side provide a high ROI and short payback period,” explains Ajay Kumar Dhir, Group CIO, JSL. He believes that the ROI should be quantifiable with high visibility for the management in order for it to get a green light. The CIO can look for areas where they can cut down on the operational expenses and instead channelize the funds to capital expenditure projects or deferred revenue expenditure entailing BPR, as process improvements would result in reduced costs for the organization. |
The playground
While there are various technologies that vendors have been pitching to the CIO to help them transform their organizations to be eco-friendly, the CIOs attention is focused towards products and technologies such as Data centers, Virtualization and Energy. Most major global computing giants that offer a vast array of products and services have a strong go to market strategy in place. Not merely content with selling boxes, these companies offer solutions such consulting services and have even ventured into data center cooling technology once thought to be the mainstay of HVAC engineering companies.
Most respondents we interacted with have used their data center facilities as the first place to deploy products and technologies that offer them energy efficiency.
“Significant energy savings can be made not only through purchase of energy efficient equipment, but also through the resulting reduction in energy required for air conditioning. Furthermore CIOs are looking at data centre consolidation and solutions that enable data centre virtualization to reduce their energy footprint,” says Adam Kleemeyer, Enterprise Product and Solution Marketing, Nortel Asia.
He feels that in addition to looking at specific products and technologies, business processes and policies can also be looked at, which could include employee policies, real estate policies, supply chain procedures, and recycling activities. Adds Kleemeyer, “For example, telecommuting and cutting back on business travel can be great ways for organizations to reduce their overall energy footprint. Whilst these activities may require changes to employee policies and practices, they are actually enabled by communications technologies such as telepresence, secure virtual private networks (VPN), and IP Telephony.”
APW President Systems, a company that has been in the business of manufacturing physical infrastructure components which are deployed in data centers now offers their clients consultancy services that help in optimizing their data center. Says Pramod Agashe, COO, APW President Systems, “The 'green IT' imperative is driven mainly by the increasing density in electronic equipment packaging. This has resulted in high heat loads and high power consumption in datacenters due to the inefficiencies of fitting in new generation equipment into older DC environments where such loads had not been planned for.”
He feels that apart from the equipment, the space components of a data center, such as racks, power distribution units, optimal rack design and optimal layout should form a key part of the overall planning that goes into the infrastructure. The company offers consultancy to help their customers to plan network infrastructure facilities, optimize IT assets, reduce costs and downtime, and future-proof their data center infrastructure in addition to power, thermal and lights out remote management.
Hewlett Packard too looks at the data center to be one of the biggest facilities which consume energy. Highlights Deepti Dang, Head of Marketing-Commercial & SMB, PSG, HP India, “The principal drivers behind the adoption of eco-friendly computing are what are referred as PCFE issues—Power, Cooling, Floor space and Environmental issues.”
She feels that the rising energy costs for powering and cooling the computing equipment and increasing cost of floor space for housing them is predominantly driving the adoption of energy efficient computing hardware. The resulting energy conservation is not only beneficial to the organization adopting green IT solutions, but also cuts down on their carbon footprint and is therefore beneficial to the environment.
Alternative solutions such as Information Lifecycle Management in a box and data center consolidation will see higher demands as customers would reduce their data center footprint and power consumption feels Rajesh Itagi, Director of Client Services at EMC. He sees customer demand exists for Virtualization technologies, which is now being looked at as a key component for every company that embarks on an Green IT initiative.
“IT infrastructures also require products from other industries to sustain the green initiative. With over heating being a concern, energy efficient cooling systems are a priority. Customers who have Disaster recovery sites should consider using DR infrastructure to share some of the application functionalities with the Production infrastructure. This reduces the need for infrastructure thereby power, cooling and also data centre space at the production site. It also ensures DR site readiness in case of a disaster,” he comments.
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Pallab Talukdar
Director Enterprise Business,
Dell India
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Pallab Talukdar, Director Enterprise Business, Dell India is of the notion that energy efficiencies, especially in a country like India with high costs of commercial power, datacenter planning and virtualization for effective resource management are all significant trends that are as much good business practices as they are environmental friendly. He feels that as companies look for better RoI and enhanced productivity, one of the most important trends is the adoption of virtualization. The company has a comprehensive virtualization offering for an energy smart datacenter, with a power efficient blade solution, smart iSCSI storage solutions, virtualization solutions with products & management tools to simplify deployment all offer significant advantages to the customers. |
Additionally the company offers Data Center Optimization Services which include virtualization and storage consulting, data center consolidation and migration and data center design, layout and configuration. With these new services, they expect their customers to further improve productivity, energy efficiency and capacity in existing facilities and avoid the significant costs associated with building a new data center.
Navigating the choppy waters
While the CIOs are quite confident about looking at investing in eco-friendly technologies and products they all unanimously declare that in such economically challenging times the CIO is required to step up and not only manage IT budgets, but also proactively help the organization in all aspects of the business–to strategically cut costs.
Says JSLs Dhir, “One of the technology areas where we can invest are collaboration tools such as Webex, Netmeeting, VC, UC, Telepresence etc. as these would cut down on the communication and transportation costs. This would have low implementation lead time and moreover the ROI and payback period would justify quick management buy-in.”
He feels that CIOs would channelize their budgets to eco-friendly servers and storage systems, deploying blade servers to save upon the data center space and power, implement thin clients, and buy LCDs instead of CRTs for desktops.
Similar sentiments are echoed by Pillai of SRL Ranbaxy who expects a lot of buying both in terms of new as well as replacement happening in display devices against CRT monitors. He also informs about the shift happening from Desktop to Laptop, which aids in not only saving in power consumption but also the ease of use. “As organizations grow we have to think of different ways to save money. It may be not be substantial in the beginning but whatever we save directly increases the profit.”
He feels that storage is another area where eco-friendly computing products will be used, as CIOs are looking at consolidating the storage requirement to save power and also execute ease of manageability.
Alternative technology
Being eco-friendly is not restricted to focusing alone on low power consuming products. Apart from computing products, there are other areas that the organization can work upon to optimize their green computing initiative. Informs JSLs Dhir, “Efforts such as conservation of paper and stationery; automation of various workflows like conveyance claims, leave, travel, reimbursement of salary perks etc. to the employees. Enterprise Content Management is another area where the organizations can work and derive a lot of mileage in supplementing the initiative.”
Most people agree that just buying eco-friendly computing product or technology will not make an organization green. “We have to focus on other areas too to reduce power consumption such as cooling etc. While the initial cost may be high if we go for solar based power generating panels but it will give us eco-friendly power at much cheaper operational cost,” informs Pillai of SRL Ranbaxy. “What ever we do must have business justification. If the mathematics works in favor of replacing the recently bought equipment with a low power consuming equipment to save power, I do not think we should bother much about it. It will be a small price to pay for a healthy environment.”
One thing is certain. The CIOs are not falling over to implement eco friendly equipment or technology just to be on the cutting edge. They are looking for definite savings to their company’s bottom lines.
Arun Gupta
CTO, Shoppers Stop | Explains Gupta of Shoppers Stop, “Considering that the major part of power consumed is in air conditioning the offices and the data centers, the need to review expenditure on such systems is high. Unfortunately the newer technologies have yet to improve the TCO over existing conventional technologies to warrant a change.” He feels that lower power consuming equipment is indeed replacing older equipment, but does not provide a business case for replacing recent purchases. He remarks, “The cost-benefit is not attractive.” |
JSL’s Dhir believes that while procuring new equipment or a replacing an existing one, the IT Manager is keen to understand the kind of power rating the equipment being procured comes with and the comparison with various competing brands. Over a period of time there is an evident shift in the focus of the IT manager to move to energy efficient devices. It is clear that the savings on account of power consumption alone would not justify replacement of recently purchased equipment with a low power consuming equipment, unless supplemented with some technology improvement.
Technologies to be in the cross hair
Vendors have been propagating various technologies and solutions which have a direct impact namely low energy consuming equipment to indirect methods such as video conferencing.
“Efficiency” says Ketan Parekh , CTO, Share Khan, is of prime importance. New equipment or technology could consume lesser power, give a better throughput & take up lesser space, hence cutting costs. He believes that organizations must install equipment that consume lesser power and space & follow international standards regarding environment safety. While focusing on hardware, he feels that optimization of software code is also one approach to consume lesser computing power.
Says Sudhir Menon, Director of Engineering, Gemstone Systems, “Low power consumption in machines, lower heat generation, higher battery life, more flash memory, smarter power measurement networks are some of the interesting technologies that will impact us. Turning your power grid into a giant two way network that transmits power usage for each home every 10 minutes and aggregates that data into a demand projection system will certainly happen. Solar buildings that contribute to the power grid, easing power generation woes, is something that will change things significantly. Wide spread use of solar film will drive this change.”
In order to capitalize on the benefits that emerging technologies have to offer, CIOs need to keep in mind the physical infrastructure of their existing network. Unified Physical Infrastructure (UPI)-based solutions are designed to help organizations manage risk within the physical infrastructure by intelligently converging physical and logical systems.
Propagates Vineeth Ram, Vice President Global Marketing, Panduit Corporation, “The UPI-based approach to infrastructure design and development opens the door to seamless convergence and interoperability throughout core business systems across all enterprise markets. This convergence results in reduced costs/TCO, power and cooling savings, space savings while ensuring that we have a lower risk of the infrastructure by increasing availability, reliability, safety, security and integration.”
He feels that Green initiatives are not limited by the logical systems infrastructure. All physical infrastructure systems need to be designed to integrate with the logical infrastructure in order to solve challenges around this space.
An argument could be made that with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, it is the physical infrastructure that would take the load of huge data being pushed down the pipe and it demands much more attention that what is usually given.
Ram feels that the trend to consolidate and virtualize systems makes the link between physical and logical even more important in order to provision resources, trouble shoot, manage and reduce MTTR. “The next generation transport media is highly complex and inter-dependent which can make physical layer integration difficult to implement and manage, so it is critical to work with vendors who have an in-depth understanding of these complexities.” he states.
Conclusion
CIOs have it planed to make investments into energy efficient solutions. What will tilt in favor for the products and solutions that they will buy is the price-to-performance ratio that is being offered by the vendors. The CIOs are looking at this recession with an opportunity to emerge as key technology differentiators. Expect Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, zero carbon data centers, solid-state devices, virtualization, precision cooling, video conference and telepresence to be in the news this year.
These is the buffet of technology spread out before the CIO who is looking at having a go with.
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