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Green is steadily becoming the color of the season. Thanks to those gloomy forecasts made by international agencies like IPCC or warning laden films like An Inconvenient Truth, almost everyone and anyone has a view on climate change and how to combat it.

But keeping the philosophical view aside, green is also the color of money. Going green might be great for the environment; it is greater for the companys bottom line these days. Keeping this view in sight, Dataquest recently concluded a three-city green event series that purported to highlight the economic side of Green IT. The event was aptly titled as Go Green 2008 to drive home the message.

The Go Green 2008 event saw participation from leading CIOs and CXOs, Green IT consultants. The highlights of the event were the keynotes and the panel discussions, wherein there was detailed discussion on the nitty-gritty of going green. The event provided a platform wherein different stakeholders came through to discuss, debate and deliberate on different aspects of green.

Delhi Embraces Green
The event was kicked off in Delhi, where the point of thrust in the discussion centered on how going green was a more business savvy decision than anything else.

In the opening note Prasanto Kumar Roy, president and chief editor, Cybermedia, said that there is a change that is visible, since most of the companies were indeed focused on saving energy in some way or the other. Some key examples are, replacing CRT with TFT monitors, creating a virtualized environment to manage technology, upgrading existing hardware set-ups with better energy efficient equipments, consolidations of storage and servers, replacing conventional servers with blade technology.

Sanjay Maind, J Soft Solutions; Subbarao Hegde, GMR Group; N Gajapathy, Aditya Birla Minacs; CV Prasad, ING Vyasa; Prasanto K Roy, Dataquest; Prasad Natu, ITC Infotech; Brij Sethi, Wipro Infotech; Dr J Gururaja, Removable Energy Advocacy Forum; Suresh Menon, Dell, debate on green issues in Bangalore.

He highlighted the fact that these steps not only helped to keep the environment clean, but also helped the companies to save a lot of money towards electricity expenditure, less power or air-conditioning back-ups, and the like.

One of the panelist at the event, Vijay Sethi, VP (IT) and CIO, Hero Honda Motors spoke on how his company had embraced greener technology like virtualization. "Sometime back we had planned to purchase around 40 servers, but later on went ahead with virtualizing the servers. "That way we not only saved money but calculated to gain our RoI in good time (4 months), in spite of the investments that we had to make in terms of installing the required software for virtualization," said Sethi.

Yet, as Vivek Dhariwal, Carbon/Climate Change expert, EVI, highlighted that there is a lot more to achieve, since there are fairly large number of companies who have done nothing so far or have taken negligible action toward creating an energy efficient business environment. Dhariwal pointed out that it is very important to first build the competencies before the going green initiative is launched. That would not only help organizations to plan their initiatives in a better and competent manner, but also cut down the cost of going green.

Meanwhile, Rajiv Garg, additional GM (IT), Bharat Heavy Electricals, spoke on the pertinent issue of going carbon neutral. He spoke on how it was also important to find out whether being carbon neutral provides any business benefits, especially in the Indian context, wherein there is no mandate of being carbon neutral. "Definitely there are certain business benefits of being carbon neutral apart from contributing towards a cleaner environment," he said.

Rajiv Garg, BHEL; Umesh Vashishta, Unitech; Prasanto K Roy, Dataquest; Vijay Sethi, Hero Honda; Vivek Dhariwal, Climate Carbon Change Event; EVI; Pallab Talukdar, Director (Enterprise Business), Dell, roll out the Green debate in Delhi	SPA Kalyansundar, Bank of India; Ujjwal Majumdar, WNS; J Ramesh, MIRC Electronics; Prasanto Kumar Roy, Dataquest; Suresh Shanmugam, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services talk about the pros and cons of green in terms of business in Mumbai

Mumbais Take on Green
The financial capital of India saw the CIOs talking about the pros and cons of going green in terms of business. For instance, PA Kalyansunder, GM (IT), Bank of India, spoke of how his bank had started a pilot project on solar power due to paucity of power and now the project was a success due to the business benefits. "This solution originated from the lack of availability of power. Now there is more awareness and we are witnessing a lot of requests from many of our zonal offices to power the IT set up with the help of solar panels. Our staff across all the 8,000 offices today are willing to adopt alternate sources of power generation from an energy efficiency and environment friendly point of view," he said.

Prasanto K Roy, the green spirit in Dataquest waxes eloquent on verdant advantages	Dells Pallab Talukdar emphasizes that green is good for tech vendors	Edgar Dias of Nortel presents the BPO point of view on the Green debate

Meanwhile, Suresh Shanmugam, head (IT), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services, spoke on the green ownership within the company. "At Mahindra Financial, the company has taken the ownership of green IT across all the units. We made the different departments responsible for their energy consumption and green activities. All the functions that were closely dependent on IT such as administration and accounting were all gradually involved in the green initiatives to create organization wide awareness about green IT and the need to save energy," he said.

Veer Sagar questions panelists in Delhi on the business benefits of green	Brij Sethi of Wipro Infotech extols on the virtues of organizations going green

On the other hand, one of leading green practitioner in India, Ujjwal Majumder, chief quality officer at WNS, spoke on how in the future green will be a business imperative. "Even today, RFPs are increasingly green driven. Customers want to work with companies who are green or have some level of green initiatives within the organization. Companies are increasingly becoming aware of the carbon footprint that they are creating and are exploring green at every level to go carbon neutral. Customers want to know about the green certifications and measures. Customers are looking at us to help them go green," he said.

Bangalores Take on Green
The IT capital of India was the last stop for this years green summit and was the most lively event. Giving the keynote address, Dr J Gururaja, executive vice president, Renewable Energy Advocacy Forum said that green fuel, green power, and green IT all are the fundamental to creating a cost effective and nature friendly business. "We have to look at the various options to solve business needs and make it greener and more cost effective. Green is not only something related to India but is a global issue and when we look at creating an environment friendly ecosystem we have to look beyond IT. The technology has grown very fast and we should find out various ways where the technology can be used to make green," he exhorted the gathering.

Engrossed audience in the Green Summit

One of the panelist, N Gajapathy, CIO, Aditya Birla Minacs highlighted how at at company green was a serious issue, "In Aditya Birla Minacs energy saving and monitoring was initiated by the HR department, all companies should take similar steps to make business green. The decision will result in a cost effective business that at the same time will be green in nature. The administrative department should set up parameters for employees regarding the same," he said.

According to CV Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya, "Taking new initiative is a bit challenging. To make the changes profitable the CIO should have a right team that can sit together and make a decision and support initiatives. Virtualization is the most important technology that can help CIOs to meet the business needs, and also to make it a green business."

All the panelists were of the opinion that green business is the need of the hour. Power and the cost in power back up are major issues faced by organizations. The green initiative is not only just to cut down the cost but is an initiative with a long-term perspective. Governments can also play a major role in resolving the problem of power. The organization should also look at natural resources that are cheap and easily available to resolve the problem and to make the business eco-friendly.

In the end, the second edition of Green IT summit was immensely popular among the CIOs and CEOs which was evident from the large numbers that had thronged the various events.

Team DQ
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

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