What a great place for talking about green tech. (What a place to relax and forget work.)

Up ahead: the sight and sound of the Andaman sea, bright sunshine, clean air. We left Delhi at 5 Celsius and smog, for the DQ Channels SP summit at Port Blair. In the opening session, solution providers (SPs) debate green tech.

The chat is predictable: a strong cynicism about the need and practicality of green. Green is CSR and environment, and nothing to do with us.

But in the enterprise space, this is changing.

In tech-dependent sectors, including IT and BPO services, telecom, and banking, energy-efficiency is a business-critical need. For chopping not just opex, but also capex: the rising cost of total backup installation in a regime of six-hour power cuts and 24x7 ops.

And that opens up an untapped opportunity for vendors. BPOs and other services firms are switching to LCD displays for 70% power savingsdropping backup and cooling costs. Yet, few vendors sell LCDs based on this equation.

Prasanto K Roy pkr@cybermedia.co.in

A home inverter setup costs Rs 20,000. But, switch from incandescent bulbs to CFLs, and you could cut down on one batteryand the Rs 8,000 saved will more than cover CFLs. Yet, CFL makers dont say this: they talk mumbo-jumbo about savings over a five-year period.

Data center vendors are doing this better than others. But they too use global metrics, including cost of power, and dont tune them to make their story more compelling in the Indian environment. Again, their focus needs to be on capex saved (backup and cooling) as well as opex (electricity and diesel).

And theres the opportunity for SPs, too: to find areas where power savings (including capex) will matter enough to offset the extra investment, with a payback of a year or less. The smart SPs who do that will make money.

Heres a green candidate: videoconferencing. Though expensive, the payoff in travel cost savings can be rapid. Third-party software will even measure and monitor cost and carbon saved, and people hours recovered.

Specialist vendors such as Polycom find that corporate India is ready to spend crores on video equipment to connect offices even in the same city, so that top bosses can avoid driving through Delhis traffic, or taking risky chopper flights in Mumbai.

Globally, PwC says it saved on 1.1 mn miles of travel last year through conferencing techand cut down 200 tonnes of CO2 emission.

Thats the direction of Dataquests green tech coverage for 2008: even if you forget CSR and environment (and few businesses have time for such nonsense, unless policy forces change), well, Green is Good Business.

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