Last week I attended a nice webinar sponsored by Nortel, AT&T and Focus that recently got archived and available to anyone on the web. The event, titled Smart Green IT: How to Cut Energy Costs Across Your IT Environment, gave a nice overview of the Green IT landscape and why it should be top of mind to IT professional, CIOs and sustainability professionals. The event was moderated by Michael Oliver-Goodwin, the Contributing Editor at Focus and featured Kenneth Siegler, Principal at IT Transformation Solutions and Bob Gaughan, a Senior Consultant for Enterprise Regional Marketing here at Nortel.

What is the webinar about?

During the session, folks will learn how to drive efficiency across the data center, infrastructure, and facilities, plus optimize energy savings in everyday operations. You can also learn about current global energy trends that are impacting IT and the best tools and resources to achieve greater energy savings.

Key points

• Key global energy trends and their impact on IT

• Best practices in planning, designing and implementing Green IT for maximum savings

• Ways companies have successfully implemented energy-efficiency in their IT environments

• Easy tools and resources for you to optimize energy savings in your organization and your buildings

Why is this important?

You only need to see a few interesting forecast from a 2030 global Energy Forecast in the webinar: 83% increase in global energy demands, 44% of global emissions will come from power generation, 70% of the global demand will come from developing countries. These upward trends create massive societal pressures around the globe, along a number of dimensions including (1) limited and disparate resource distribution around the world, (2) environmental limitations and challenges like climate change and (3) instability of resource cost, probably best exemplified by the massive fluctuation in oil over the last several years. All these issues, and many more, make efficiency ever more important, to ensure that each and every unit of input is getting maximized. So many buildings do not effectively manage their resource use in a holistic manner aimed at maximizing inputs that are necessarily limited, such a energy, water and IT load. The opportunity here is massive, and whole scale changes in the levels of efficiency across countries and regions would slow the scary trends above and address those societal pressures I outline above.

Simply put- the multitude of buildings around the world need to be much more efficient. One of the best tools for moving towards a green (both money savings and resource savings) building from the IT perspective is through the integration of green IT and building management. The basic idea is to integrate all of the siloed building software and management into a single IP network/platform. The result creates a single platform to monitor and mange the resource use of the building. With information gained via this comprehensive and dynamic platform, mangers can effectively adjust the building performance to lower cost and resource use. This is the ultimate goal, to be efficient and do more with fewer resources.

In my mind, doing more with fewer resources is the only way out of the exiting and increasing resource crunch. Buildings are just one of the opportunities, but they are a large one.