Fujitsu stakes claim in green IT services

After a successful test in Australia, Fujitsu is launching a portfolio of green IT services that it says will help the average enterprise reduce its carbon footprint and energy costs.

Kartik Ravel, practice director of green IT for Fujitsu America, while the new offerings absolutely will address data center efficiency, they are more focused on changing user electricity consumption habits related to desktop and peripheral technologies. "A kilowatt is a kilowatt, regardless of what device it comes from," he says.

One of the companies that already has had the benefit of the Fujitsu services is Toyota; Fujitsu says it helped the company save 43 percent on its IT costs, although it doesn't say how much of this is specifically from electricity.

There are two services available immediately:

• QuickStart, which is a two-week assessment that is intended to identify areas where an organization might be able to achieve green IT impact most quickly. The $25,000 service looks at business operations, data center efficiency, end-user efficiency, metrics and monitoring, and lifecycle and procurement.
• Green IT Delivery Solution, which helps businesses define sustainability goals more specifically and put in place plans to help realize measurable results. Although it isn't explicit, Fujitsu touts a number of its own technologies as integral to achieving many of these goals including Dynamic Infrastructures (which is essentially its private cloud offering) and FlexFrame for SAP. Although the costs of these services varies depending on the scope, Fujitsu services vice president Jim Bradbury says they range from $100,000 to $150,000 over a period of four to six months.

I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that Fujitsu has sponsored some recent research focused on assessing the level of activity within large IT departments specifically devoted to green IT. This data is being released in the form of its Green IT: Global Benchmark report, which finds that progress toward green IT has been slow. The best-performing country out of the four surveyed for the report was the United Kingdom, which (not surprisingly) has the most "stringent carbon reduction and reporting regimen." BUT, the kinda cool thing is that even in the absence of the same thing, the United States was the second best because of the overall level of IT management sophistication generally found in larger countries. Generally speaking, companies from the high-tech industry ranked highest on the sophistication scale while companies from the wholesale, retail and logistics sector ranked lowest.

And, in a sort of be-careful revelation for those of you how outsource a great deal, India scored the lowest for green IT practices. In fact, the research found, few green IT practices are found in that country.

One of the biggest watch areas for all countries surrounds lifecycle management and the issue of e-waste. Most of the companies surveyed, Fujitsu, are using "environmentally unsound IT procurement and e-waste practices."