Big UK businessesare ahead of the rest of Europe when it comes
to introducing environmentally friendly strategies, but are
trailing behind their German counterparts.
Almost half of UK businesses interviewed for IDC's
Dell-sponsored Green IT Project Barometer, have corporate green
strategies and 60% of these
include IT.
In a survey of 459 businesses with more than 1000 employees
across Europe 46% of UK firms said they had a green strategy
compared to 51% of German firms and an average across Europe of
35%. Another 29% of UK companies plan to introduce such a
strategy.
Nathaniel Martinez, analyst at IDC, said that all companies are
under pressure to cut costs because of the economic
slowdown.Managing outdated datacentres with power-hungry servers is
putting the greenIT agenda in the boardroom.
He said many datacentres were built before technologies such as
blade servers and multi-core chips came on the scene. As a result
they are inefficient when dealing with the higher levels of
computing power.
"Spending on servers is flat but the cost of running and
managing them is rising fast. About 80% of the spending is on
powering and cooling servers," added Martinez
But according to the study cost is not the main driving force
for the take up of more environmentally friendly IT equipment.
Regulatory compliance is the main driving force, marginally, with
over 75% of the surveyed group seeing it as an important influence
compared to
just under 75% citing cost reduction as important.
But the report said introducing green strategies is easier said
than done. A total of 42% said there is a lack of industry
guidance, 34% said the
metrics used to measure the green IT impact are not sufficient
and 60% said there are nocorporate incentives.
Martinez said although some organisations might scale back their
green IT initiatives in the face of recession, detailed return on
investment studies will help them justify investments.