MSPs: Move Beyond the Green IT Hype And Pursue Practical Results

By Peter Sandiford 1

If there is a Gartner Hype Cycle for “Green IT” we are probably near the top.  That is typically where the conversation turns from undeserved over optimism to widespread skepticism, before ultimately emerging as a practical everyday reality.  Now is the time to begin to move beyond the hype to focus on practical results.  And nowhere is this search for practical results more lucrative than in SMB managed services.

Today we released a Green Industry Report titled Green IT:  A Big Opportunity for Managed Services, describing the direct implications for solution providers and their customers that can result from the adoption of remote monitoring and management using Managed Workplace. Here’s a look at our findings.

Based on direct feedback from our Partners and related research, we concluded that from travel reductions and intelligent power management alone, the average solution provider using Managed Workplace® can create $190,000/year in savings while reducing Green House Gas (GHG) emissions by 10 metric tons per year.

These savings are certainly motivation enough to adopt remote monitoring and management.  But as governments and corporations move to recognize the value of these GHG emission reductions through various Carbon Trading and Carbon Tax Programs, the actual carbon reductions themselves will begin to shift from soft “feel good” benefits to emerge as a new source of competitive advantage.

Many of our partners in Europe, and those that sell to municipalities and school boards located in the US and Canada, are already able to leverage their Green IT advantages to win new business.  The ability to demonstrate and measure Green IT contributions will soon become a basic requirement of doing business around the world.

Most IT equipment in the world today resides in the tens of millions of SMBs served by hundreds of thousands of solution providers, not in the corporate data centers that have been at the focus of the Green IT discussion to date.  An even more important fact is that the greatest contribution to cost and GHG emissions reductions in managed services results from the decrease in the need to drive a vehicle to customer sites – the infamous “truck roll”.  Based on these observations, the greatest contribution to the Greening of IT will come specifically from the widespread adoption of remote monitoring and management technologies by the solution provider community.

Note: The  Green IT:  A Big Opportunity for Managed Services is available as a PDF from the MSPmentor Resource Center (free registration is required).

Note: Peter Sandiford is CEO of Level Platforms. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor.net’s Platinum sponsorship.