Accenture sees profit in green IT

Bonecutter: greener product procurement will help

Accenture is positioning itself to capture a new market created by the growing concern over the environmental footprint of enterprise IT.

The consultancy giant insists its green technology differs from the strategies launched by big hardware vendors, such as Dell, IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems, which offer greener products that meter the power use of systems.

Accenture’s services will study power use, attempt to quantify the benefits of changes and analyse side effects, and look at greener product procurement and disposal strategies, said Rockwell Bonecutter, green IT managing director at Accenture.

Bonecutter cited the example of a proposed virtualisation strategy that could be examined to show the business what emissions and costs could be saved, but also the effect on performance and user experience.

Accenture believes its three-part offering covers the key user issues.

A datacentre estimator will suggest energy reduction strategies based on a number of factors, including power use, performance and expected changes in demand.

A workplace estimator helps companies look at how green IT strategies, such as thin clients and telepresence, will affect the organisation in other ways.

A green maturity model will assess the overall environmental efficiency of IT, based on the responses to 300 questions across five key areas – working practice, office environment, datacentre, procurement and corporate citizenship.

The responses will prompt Accenture to provide the user with a number of options to green its IT, from short-term quick wins to longer-term strategies.

“We present them with a series of levers, and tell them the expected outcome of pulling those levers at different times,” said Bonecutter.

The service will not take into account whole-of-life carbon footprint, but will analyse disposal issues, adjusted to account for local regulation.

Consultancy Deloitte is rumoured to be launching a similar offering, and the r egulatory environment on emissions in the UK and across the EU means others are likely to move into the market.

Euan Davies, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that organisations will increasingly look outside the datacentre for green strategies.

“The other vendors’ activity in this space has largely been in the datacentre.
Companies are going to be looking at wider measures,” he said.

Forrester estimates green IT services spending will reach $4.8bn (£2.4bn) by 2013.