This new years day dawned in Delhi like most others: Cold, smoggy, low visibility, 3 Celsius in the early hours, then some sunshine. Flight disruptions at Delhi airport. And power cuts, up to six hours in parts of the region.

For the tech industry, it was a new years day of hope. At the tail end of a fiscal where ICT is set to contribute 10% of Indias GDP, theres worry among exporters about the sliding dollar, joy among importers about the same thing, and hope about a robust domestic ICT market booming across most sectors.

In a way, the power cuts set the tone for the year ahead for enterprise IT.

The average CIO doesnt lose a lot of sleep over the cost of energyor the environment. (There are exceptions).

But ask them about the capex, and its a different story.

In Gurgaon or Bangalore or most of India, businesses face six hours of power cuts, and back up everythingIT and phones to lights and air-con. With big UPSs and batteries and gensets. The more power-hungry the equipment, the more you spend on backup and cooling.

Prasanto K Roy pkr@cybermedia.co.in

Take a company with 500 PCs, and CRT displays. Thats a lot of power and heat, so you need a big UPS, a major air-con, and a giant genset to back up that air-con. If instead you use LCDs, you save 25 kilowatts of power, and you get that much less heat, to cool down! Yes, the LCDs add up to an extra Rs 30 lakh. Is the spend worth it?

The answer is yes for many in the ICT- intensive sectors, including ITS/BPO, telecom, banking, ISPs, or other companies with large data centers. Telcos struggling with lowering tariffs are finding the cost of power a driver in equipment selection. Energy costs are driving banks toward ATMs consolidation.

The opex cost of power and the capex cost of backup and cooling are forcing these businesses to look hard at the power efficiency of their data centers and their desktops and networks. SMBs are buying laptops to avoid spending on UPSs, and power and network cabling.

This is just a part of the story. Performance per watt is the name of the game, from enterprise servers to mobile devices. There are small successes, and a long, uphill road.

Dataquest begins its special year-long focus on green tech with this issue, following our Greet IT CIO Summit in December..

Green will be the color of the year, not of CSR or environmental activism but of economics and energy efficiency. A few vendors and enterprises will figure that out earlier, and profit from that knowledge.

Heres to a greener 2008.

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