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The big green challenge.
Green really should be the new gold as far as the IT channel is concerned. It’s difficult to think of any other issue that has been so inextricably linked with every aspect of technology use.
From communications to storage, from the datacentre to remote working, purchasing decisions are increasingly driven by a desire for more efficiency, lower processing costs and less energy consumption, says Piers Ford.
But the industry as a whole has been slow to translate this natural fit into robust marketing messages that actually generate revenues. Vendors are shouting their green credentials from the rooftops. But it is only recently that we have started to see environmental and energy benefits sharing equal space with promises of improved efficiency and productivity on the marketing agenda.
Selma Kveim, EMEA vice president for channel business at Fujitsu Siemens – which, as a German company, is rooted in a culture where recycling and eco-friendly production processes have long been entrenched in law – says that resellers have a key role to play in developing services and solutions that address fundamentally ‘green’ issues.
“As an industry, we have to start looking at this as a new business area,” she says. “The latest EU research suggests that the environmental business in general is now worth €1 trillion, and that will double in the next 4-5 years. That opens up an enormous amount of scope for new products and services. The products are our responsibility. But the services are open ground and we’re in the early stages.”
Kveim points to the UK mobility market as an example of ‘green’ exploitation by the channel. “As a concept, offering the benefits of flexible working and less pollution from travel, the UK is leading the way on mobility, and it forces the channel to deliver an outstanding solution – less about the hardware and software and more about how you work and use computer products to enable new ways of working,” she says.
“We turn to our resellers to help us develop these products. This is a new service opportunity for them. We don’t want to compete with them in new areas of profitability. What we can contribute, we will. But a lot of these things have to be driven locally because they are culturally dependent. It’s more about talking around the issue and sharing ideas, so resellers use us as a sounding board and we see how we can standardise those ideas in a product.”
Not surprisingly, with energy consumption and costs so high on the corporate agenda, server and storage virtualisation are the ‘hottest’ current green-led IT trends. Storage and virtualisation vendors are working with the channel to translate energy savings into meaningful cost savings for their customers.
“IT was originally a green initiative – a lot of what it achieves is energysaving – but the key is in the way people deploy it,” says Marcos Burnett, ONStor’s UK country manager. “There needs to be analysis that quantifies the physical saving on a lower output: greener figures that a channel partner can take out to the customer. It’s difficult to do because you have to take the worst-case scenario when most customers will have storage systems that are usually partly powered down.
“But as a virtualisation company, we’ve pushed into partners who are already in that space, working with customers who are aware of these issues. Our system requires 150 watts of power, so by virtualising 10 high spec servers that could each consume 240 watts, we can show an extraordinarily high saving. The trick is getting partners to include those figures in their ROI studies as a matter of course.”
During the coming year, Burnett expects to see channel partners undertaking studies on behalf of their clients. “It would make good commercial sense for them to design a methodology to study a customer’s green issues – cost savings, improvements, identifying the way forward,” he says. “And that starts with our education around ROI, because it will form part of the methodology.”
Matt Piercy, channel director for northern Europe at virtualisation software vendor VMware, agrees that this is where the channel has to focus. “We did a round of partner updates six months ago, talking about three key initiatives with a green focus,” he says. “White papers, marketing collateral and case studies. And we’ve developed a very simple, effective cost analysis tool – using data from manufacturers about power consumption, so they are industry figures rather than ours - that allows them to go out to customers and talk hard numbers. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible. “Beyond that it’s the opportunity, instead of simply continuing to supply hardware and services on an ongoing basis, for the channel to take out a refreshing message and get customers to commit over a long period of time. The reward is in software sales, servers with higher margins and the number of [chargeable] hours the resellers must spend on a customer site to bring it to reality. It needs to be a well managed journey and we ask our partners to invest in engineering skills and resources accordingly.”
At the application end of the industry, video conferencing and document management are two technologies that have obvious green roots and offer themselves as alternatives to traditional, energy and resource consuming practices. Like VMware, Tandberg Data has developed a green calculator that allows its partners to demonstrate how much they will save by ‘meeting’ in video-conference rather than travelling to physical locations. “We allow our partners to cobrand it and put it on their own web sites,” says Wayne Stephens, EMEA director of partners and alliances. “The customer can see how many dollars they are saving and that further enhances the proposition.”
Document management software vendor Version One has adopted a ‘do as we do’ policy with its partners. “We do two things with our resellers,” says sales manager Richard Abraham. “We encourage them to think in terms of their own environmental impact and work with them on their own businesses, developing carbon offsetting initiatives and understanding the bigger issues. It’s about leading by example – customers will see it as something that sets them apart from other resellers, so will generate revenues. “And the reseller can promote the fact that the technology – the document management system – that they use themselves can help the customer reduce their carbon impact.”
Some resellers feel vendors could still do a lot better in their role as thought-leaders, focusing less on single issues such as power consumption and paying more attention to the total picture, right down to recycling the packaging that the server arrives in. “The ultimate goal is green-asbest- practice, and that take on the whole IT infrastructure needs to come from the big vendors,” says Richard Siddaway, Microsoft practice leader at IT services provider Centiq. “Most of the major hardware vendors seem to be falling over themselves to promote their green credentials but in reality, much of it boils down to power saving during operations.”
“They’re not doing enough,” agrees Patrick Copping, business development director at Swyx reseller Atia Solutions, which recently gained carbon neutral status. “Every little bit helps, but they need to demonstrate their commitment and help make customers aware of the impact they are having on the environment. For example, one area that the likes of Cisco and Nortel will always push is the home working environment. But if the solution costs a business £1 million, they won’t do it! So the technology has to be made Selma Kveim cheaper as well.”