Vizard: Vendors' green-IT spiels aren't ringing true; they're
trying to push inventory by appealing to a futuristic payoff that does
nothing but bring risk to IT in the short term. Everywhere you go these days there seems to be a vendor talking
about the virtues of green computing. The most recent example of this
trend was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week promising to reduce the
amount of energy that Microsoft products consume by a factor of five.
Ballmer wasn't very specific about how this would be accomplished,
but you could take it as a tacit admission that a lot of bloated code
that has built up over the years is a major contributor to the problem.
Ballmer played the green card at CeBIT. Read more here.
The basic pitch from all these vendors is that IT organizations
should upgrade their computer infrastructure in the name of saving
energy costs. That in turn will have a positive impact on the
environment because there will be less harmful carbons produced.
That's a noble sentiment, but sentimentality usually doesn't have a
lot of bearing on whether an IT organization is going to upgrade their
systems. In fact, you could pretty easily argue that when it comes to
upgrades in general it's highly probable that vendors are trying to
inflate sagging PC and server sales by telling everybody that upgrading
them is good for the environment and their wallets.
The reason for all this altruism from the vendor community has very
little to do with being moved by viewing "An Inconvenient Truth," the
documentary for which Al Gore (who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on
climate change) won an Academy Award.
Instead, it has everything to do with slowing hardware sales in
corporate environments. Specifically, corporations are getting a lot
more longevity out of their existing PC systems running Windows XP
because there is no compelling reason for the vast majority to upgrade
to Windows Vista. And on the server side of the equation,
virtualization is helping companies increase the utilization of their
existing servers to the point where the need to upgrade server
infrastructure is being sharply reduced.
None of this means that saving energy costs might not actually pay
for the cost of the upgrade over an extended period of time. But the
problem IT people run into is that for the most part the electric bills
in their companies comes out of the facility budget rather than the IT
budget. In other words, IT doesn't get a whole lot of credit for saving
the company money on the electric bill.
Mention green IT and the conversation turns bashfully to the lowly network printer. Click here for the story.
What they get instead is a grilling from the finance department over
why the company should part with millions of dollars for new system
upgrades. In the unlikely event they get the approval, they also get
all the risks associated with upgrading systems that for the most part
were running existing applications perfectly well.
So in return for taking on all these challenges, the only real
reward for the IT department is the comforting knowledge that they did
something positive for the environment by upgrading their company's IT
infrastructure.
Appistry has launched a free download program for its grid-based application platform. Click here to read more.
There may come a day when the government rewards companies through
tax breaks for making those types of decisions. But in the meantime,
all green computing does is help companies in some far-off future day
when they are standing in front of the gates of heaven. At the next
performance review, however, it's only going to get people to question
their sense of risk versus actual reward in the here and now.
Michael Vizard is Senior Vice President/Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Enterprise. He can be reached at michael.vizard@ziffdavisenterprise.com.
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