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Organisations will soon have no choice but to comply with green IT principles because of market forces, according to a BCS video debate.

Smart IT organisations need to include low-cost software solutions into their long-term strategic plans in order to survive in the current marketplace, which is moving towards cloud computing and the commoditisation of computer resources, the debate Green IT: Recycling Versus Reuse reveals.

Kate Craig-Wood, Managing Director of green hosting company Memset, and a member of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, said: ‘Everything is being pushed back to the data centre, and in that market the people with the lowest costs will win and the people with the lowest cost will be the people who use their equipment most efficiently. Commoditisation is being driven by the efficient companies, and those who are inefficient will die, especially in the current climate.’

Green IT, Green data centers remain a topic of discussion, there has been a lot of debate regarding the politics and the economics of deploying a carbon neutral or Green IT solution.  If we abstract ourselves from such discussions, we can focus on a few key concepts – deploying a more energy efficient infrastructure can not only reduce your IT costs, it can transform the end user experience, we need to be thinking of Green IT from not only an environmental concept but also outside the box. Do we really want our pcs to be depreciated over three years? Would it not be better for the environment (in terms of energy efficiency), operating costs and power to replace every two? After three years are you not upgrading the operating system, deploying new applications and evolving the infrastructure, are the pcs not almost out of vendor support anyway?

We need to combine two things, Green IT and service delivery/operating costs, only when we look at what infrastructure we have and what we are doing with it, can we then start to look at the support process, the delays to excellence, the reason that your reports don’t arrive on the Monday morning, or why your desktop is so slow.

Green IT need not be something for IT, for corporate social responsibility teams to be thinking about, it could simply be, is there a more efficient way of doing this? The challenge I wonder is not so much economics, but politics and internal charging metrics, users don’t pay their true operating cost, they don’t pay a per unit cost of power, of support, the guy with a P300 pays the same in support as the guy with a Core Duo 2, it’s a fixed cost. There is no benefit if you like to be upgrading your hardware, to be thinking about the power consumed, until that changes, the move towards Green IT will be successful, but not as successful as it could have been, but then as the CIO had pointed out to me “who want’s to pay their true cost, the business just wouldn’t pay it… their key systems might suddenly be uneconomical..”

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