Green is Good if the Price is Right

By Greg McNevin

June 24, 2008: With companies around the world jostling to show off how green they are and greenwash subsequently on the rise, a new study has appeared that illustrates that despite being a marketing tool and good for the environment, going green can be profitable.

Conducted by Strategic Oxygen, the GCI Group and Cohn & Wolfe, the global green enterprise IT study canvassed 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers – including CXOs, CIOs, IT Managers and Line of Business Managers – in 11 countries, looking at 26 enterprise technology brands to determine decision makers' perceptions of green IT, products and marketing.

More than 70 percent of those surveyed said they “probably” or “definitely” would increase their preference for a brand’s green products if they were convinced of the positive impact on the environment and business, while almost 60 percent said they would expect to pay a premium for green products.

Overall the survey found that no single enterprise IT brand is perceived as a clear green leader globally, and that there are disconnects within organisations on the importance of being more environmentally conscious with price being seen as barrier.

The survey picked out firms such as HP, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Intel, Sony and Dell as leaders in the field of green IT, and companies such as SAP, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel and EMC as laggards.

Google was also singled out as a company with high environmental priorities.

“It's interesting that Google, a company that does not produce tangible hardware or software, but consumes a significant amount of resources appears so highly on this list,” said Michael Gale, CEO, Strategic Oxygen. “They've clearly done a good job of demonstrating they are working hard to innovate new, more power efficient solutions.”

When asked about barriers to adopting a greener approach to hardware, those surveyed cited price above anything else (38 percent), with internal disagreements and political factors coming in second (25 percent) and efficiency failing to offset costs (22 percent) coming in third.

When it comes to the type of green technology decision-makers were thinking about investing in, laptops were named as the most important (74 percent of respondents), followed by desktops (72 percent) and servers (64 percent).

This illustrates that while solutions such as virtualisation and data deduplication are reducing the environmental impact of data centres, green thinking is increasingly moving beyond the back end and out into the field.

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