THE THEME of HP’s conference took a while to emerge. And when it finally revealed itself one can understand the caution. There was a server product announcement, a virtualisation management software product announcement and a list of new data centre services around consolidation, critical facilities, virtualisation, orchestration and hosted infrastructure.

But identifying an underlying strategy proved elusive. That is, until the man from the World Wildlife Fund took to the stage and said IT contributes 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions but that it is the other 98% where IT can have the biggest impact.

That was it in an endangered nutshell. Suddenly everything became clear.

For the past two years it has been a huge task with big IT suppliers to find a way to tackle the green agenda without exposing themselves to accusations of hypocrisy, band wagon jumping or worse, hurting the business.

While they’ve been setting up task forces and appointing committees they’ve also been worried that someone else is going to get the jump on them. Combine this with the knowledge that the regulators are circling and you can imagine the sleepless nights. It is a situation where there’s only a first mover disadvantage. First to put their head above the parapet will most likely get it shot off.

How do you convince customers that your products are green when you yourself don‘t know how much energy consumption goes into their raw materials, manufacture, use, decommission and reclamation? The answer is you don‘t. At least not yet. But you tell those concerned that you are working on it but that the numbers will take two years to crunch. And in the meantime you stick with one of Murphy’s laws: That if more than one person is responsible for something, then no-one can get the blame.

In this context that’s also another definition for the word holistic
That’s why HP’s move is a clever one. Green targeting through data centre serv ices means that you can been seen to be doing something without focusing on the hardware bits that actually suck up the power. And as each data centre is different a services portfolio approach works best.

But really, there is no need to worry at all because all suppliers are in the same boat. Let’s imagine a scenario. Somewhere in America, John Chambers, CEO Cisco, Mark Hurd, CEO HP, Sam Palmisano, CEO IBM meet at a country club.

JC: “You guys cracked this green thing yet?”
MH: “uh uh”
SP: “Maybe soon. I‘ve got task forces coming out my ass.”
JC “I’m a good friend of Al Gore”
MH “Nice move”
SP: “But we need to convince Capitol Hill and those goddamn socialists in Euroland not to regulate and we haven’t got any way of measuring, let alone proving how much energy it takes to build and run anything we make.”
MH: “Let’s tell them that we’re working on it, that it’ll take two years and meantime we all agree that no-one goes off message.
JC: OK 1) “We’re working on reducing the power used by our products. 2) Energy conservation is a key concern for us. 3) IT products are actually green because they enable business to cut their carbon footprint elsewhere.”

Everyone agrees and another round of Finnish Glacier Water is ordered.

OK enough with the conspiracy theories. These guys are capitalists and competitors and would never collude on anything. Note that no big IT company has yet described itself or its products as green. They say they are trying. But long term, it is not a sustainable position. µ

See also
HP worried about nocturnal emissions

Toshiba makes companies green with envy