OK, Dell. Maybe your tech's greener, but what about green services?

Great timing on Dell's part. Wait until arch-rival (or at least one of them) Hewlett-Packard is busy chatting up the press about a minor (ha!) services acquisition, and then WAY up the ante when it comes to an energy-efficiency proclamation.

Here's the thing: While other vendors, including HP, are working on improving energy-efficiency of future systems based on the performance of systems that are several years old, Dell is using today's technology as its benchmark for moving forward.

With its announcement, Dell is hoping to cut the consumption of its laptops and desktops by 25 percent between now and 2010. It already has cut the among of electricity that its OptiPlex desktops use in half since 2005. So there! Also, and I didn't know this, Dell is the first company to finagle a Bronze-level EPEAT certification for its power supplies. The company offers more 80 PLUS-compliant supplies than any other major computer manufacturer. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the EPEAT Web site (which certifies various computer products for materials and energy efficiency criteria.) And, here's a reference for 80 PLUS. The big deal there, is that there is less power wasted by 80 PLUS supplies in the electricity conversion process.

Larry Dignan posted some specifics earlier today, so I won't rehash all of them. Plus I'm talking to the brains behind this announcement, Albert Esser of the Dell Product Group, sometime next week so I don't want to steal all that thunder.

OK, but here's where I start thinking that HP's EDS buyout is going to have huge implications in the green IT services realm. It's certainly too early for much to have been said, but the green IT services field is wide open, especially in the data center, which EDS traditionally has plenty of cconnections. If you reread this post from a few months back, you'll remember that HP's services already has gone after the green business big-time. Forrester puts the total opportunity about around $4.5 billion annually by 2013. You can bet HP's EDS acquisition will accelerate its ability to capture a respectable piece of this.

And, at the end of the day, when an HP services person is scoping a data center for a major green initiative, you can bet he or she isn't going to be quick to recommend Dell equipment.

So, big thumbs up on the green tech, Dell dudes. But what are you going to do about the services piece?