Doug Washburn explains how this baseline calculator can help in quantifying Green IT implementation practice:

* Guide your greening efforts with solid data. Avoid guessing about what to green first by referencing concrete statistics on energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and cost per IT asset.
* Create realistic goals. Measuring IT’s energy consumption will help you estimate the possible environmental and economic benefits of going green, ensuring your green-related goals are realistic.
* Quantify the benefits over time. Once you have implemented green upgrades to your IT assets, compare your new energy consumption to your baseline, highlighting both environmental and economic savings.

Here is a calculator tool. Give it a test drive and share your feedback.

The year 2009 will be a tipping point for the CFO’s involvement with IT. Large businesses have hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars locked up in their IT organizations including data center facilities, systems assets, and organizational capabilities built over time. In a world where capital is at a premium, CFOs will seek to use IT assets as a lever to generate cash.

There will be different kind of outsourcing deals, requiring financial savviness in deal structuring.

They may sign outsourcing deals that include a bigger financing aspect, such as having IT service providers make a large up-front payment in return for higher margins over the course of a contract. They may sell and lease back hard assets, such as data center facilities. They may place favorable vendor financing at the core of hardware and software purchasing decisions, as many companies in heavy industry do when they buy industrial equipment and as telcos have done for years.

Also CIOs will be asked to give their views on containing cost using idle or existing IT capacity:

Successful CIOs will give the senior-management team practical ideas on how to optimize cash.

As cloud computing and SaaS deployment gains momentum, trend towards data center cost rationalization will be interesting to observe. There are other important comments made by Stefan Spang in the report. Government regulations will play a crucial role. Though not all for the negative reasons. Barack Obama’s commitment to green building and energy efficiency targets will help sector specific CIOs to review their budget allocation. Vendor consolidation is going to be a clear trend this year. CIOs will be busy chasing key personnel from outsourcing partners and making sure business continuity processes are in place. Any vendor flameout and hostile M&A should not affect core business technology processes. CIOs will be very busy this year. If you are pitching to them, use numbers. Pitch using numbers to tie IT goals with bottom-line and top-line will get audience. 15 minutes of pitch time ie.

(Follow complete Windows 7 analysis on engineering team blog)

It’s main focus will be on reducing idle power consumption and supporting new device power modes. Windows 7 starts up, shuts down, resumes from standby, and responds faster.

Also read:

Seven power saving tips by Laarni on PCMag

How to manage Windows 7 power settings by Pedro on EntepriseITPlanet. Interesting comment by Brad Jones on smart power save using light dimming

Clearly this report leaves a big reputation footprint on Google’s green credentials (Check Google Carbon Footprint project). To say that a Google search has a definite environmental impact can be devastating to Google’s reputation as well their bottomline. Google makes 12 cents from each search. With 62.0% of US search market and accounting for 200 million of search queries every day, Google image can be in trouble here.



Wissner-Gross research also sheds light on individual users. Viewing simple web page generates about 0.2g of CO2 per second. Whereas Google PR will clearly go on overdrive to address this report. They better do this sooner before Michelle Malkin inflates this all over capital hill.

CIOs, who manage corporate Data Center will be well advised to introduce good search practices to minimize unnecessary page-surfing.

Update: Google, without losing any time, has a politically corrected rebuttal:

Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses “half the energy as boiling a kettle of water” and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

“There’s no conflict about being a green airline and being happy because of the value of fuel savings. Environmentalists and business have the same objectives for a change.”

— Henrik Ambak, former CIO and now head of environment, Cargolux