Next week, the Gartner research group is holding the European leg of its IT Symposium, which will feature four days of thinking on sustainability.
Coinciding with that event, the results are out of an
assessment of 28 global information and communication technology (ICT)
providers by Gartner and WWF Sweden which revealed that the ICT industry sees
climate change and sustainability as an emerging opportunity. While it
identified the emergence of a group of market makers, the industry as a whole
fell short of making climate change and sustainability part of its core
business.
"2009
and 2010 have seen rapid progress in the maturity of ICT vendors both in terms
of their internal environmental programs, and the development of a set of
low-carbon market offerings," said Simon Mingay, research vice president
at Gartner. "We now have a clear group of market makers formed by BT, IBM,
Cisco, Ericsson, HP, Fujitsu, and SAP who we believe are beginning to build a
distinguishing capability. However, at this stage they have not really taken
the issues associated with climate change and sustainability into the core of
the business and their strategies, and they continue to deal with it within the
mindset of incremental improvement and short-termism."
Gartner
and WWF invited 28 global ICT providers to participate. Nineteen chose to
participate by providing the required information. Those companies include:
Accenture, Alcatel-Lucent, BT, CSC, Cisco, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson,
Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, SAP, Sun Microsystems, TCS, Verizon,
Wipro and Xerox.
The
survey, the second of its kind, examined ICT providers' commitment to managing
the environmental aspects of their internal operations and their supply chain.
Very importantly, it also explored their capabilities in advancing the
low-carbon solutions markets and developing products and services that will
help them and their customers reduce their greenhouse gas emissions or increase
their energy efficiency.
"The
good news is that we don't see anyone going backwards," said Mingay.
"But, across every category, there are clearly a group who are on the
move and a group who seem to be treading water relatively." IBM, Fujitsu,
HP, Cisco and BT ranked in the top five positions, while others such as Verizon
and Lenovo did not score particularly well, and held the No. 19 and No. 17
spots, respectively. Mingay said Microsoft, ranked in the No. 13 position
overall, is making reasonable progress, from a relatively weak starting point.
The
survey revealed that service and software providers have improved their
position from 2008, but remain relatively immature in terms of both their
internal programs, as well as their market offerings. SAP, ranked No. 8
overall, did substantially better than any of the other large software and
services organisations. SAP has put sustainability at the heart of its
communications and closer to its strategy over the last 18 months. The survey
also found that Fujitsu, ranked No. 2, is the only ICT provider to set a
long-term context to its initiatives, and want to help reduce more emissions in
society through low carbon IT solutions than their own emissions. Fujitsu has
set itself a carbon reduction goal in terms of its impact on its customers
versus a target related to their own emissions. Finally, ICT providers in Asia
(not Japan) are still lagging overall, but making some dramatic improvements,
which Gartner analysts anticipate will continue.
The
dominance of talking in 2008, when Gartner and WWF Sweden completed their first
assessment has evolved into much more action in 2009 and 2010. "We now
have a number of ICT providers with an actual low carbon portfolio and a
readiness to move from an incremental contribution into the center stage when
it comes to providing society with low carbon solutions," said Magnus
Emfel, director of Climate Program, WWF Sweden. "It is precisely this
shift -- from ICT as a minor contributor to global emissions to a major enabler of
low-carbon solutions -- that we need to see replicated in business strategies
and urban planning, if we are to succeed in the transition to a low carbon
economy and stabilize the climate."
The
survey also found that inter-industry partnerships are starting to emerge,
particularly from ICT providers including Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and IBM. This
is a very significant and important step in ICT's ability to develop
commercially viable solutions for a low-carbon economy, particularly around
smart grid, intelligent buildings and smart city infrastructures.
When
looking at ICT's own impact, and the focus on the 2 percent of ICT's global CO2
emissions, it has become evident that hardware vendors, such as HP, Ericsson
and Fujitsu are increasingly focused on the energy efficiency of their
equipment and making it a core business, while for software and services
organisations this is not the case. Very few vendors are thinking about
dematerialisation in any real systematic way, though Xerox is one of the few
exceptions that is reusing and recycling parts.
Collectively
the ICT industry has enhanced its game in terms of providing solutions in other
areas, e.g. transport and buildings, to help reduce the 98 percent of global
CO2 emissions that are not generated by ICT, but that can be reduced with the
help of smart ICT.
"Although
the leaders in the Carbon Delivery sections such as IBM, Fujitsu, HP, BT,
Ericsson and Cisco have begun to build structural capabilities, governance, and
allocated organisational resources to addressing the opportunities of a
low-carbon economy, their commitment still falls short of being integrated into
their core business," Mingay said.
Gartner's
client interactions and analysis of the survey suggests this is due to a lack
of spending on low-carbon and sustainability-related solutions by the public
and private sectors, except in the area of smart grids, but also to the ICT
sector's conservative approach built on incremental changes in existing
technologies and capacity.
"We
were surprised at the lack of disruptive innovation, with the majority of
responses essentially focused on the incremental 'client-driven'
development," said Dennis Pamlin, co-author and independent consultant
working for WWF Sweden on this project. "If the ICT industry is to deliver
on its promise of making a significant contribution to enabling a
transformation to a low-carbon economy it is going to require substantially
more than marginal incrementalism."
"No
one is making any serious effort to extend the life of equipment beyond the
basics one would expect of improving reliability and quality," said Mingay. "But, with the management of e-waste and rare earth metals rapidly
turning into a substantial global challenge and the growth of emerging markets
the industry needs to be giving much more serious thought to dematerialisation,
recycling and longevity."
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