Service providers can now be recognized for their green IT capabilities, with the industry’s first green certification initiative from the standards group MSPAlliance (MSPA). The new program, announced last week at the Managed Services Summit in Las Vegas, signals the growing importance of green IT within enterprises beyond just the data center, which is where most green initiatives have historically been concentrated. Moreover, Datamonitor believes it gives service providers an increased incentive to exploit the largely untapped green IT market among small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The certification, called the Green IT Program for Managed Service Providers, is available only to MSPA members. There are currently about 7,000 of them worldwide, including large enterprise providers such as Hewlett-Packard, EDS, NEC Global Solutions, Siemens and Wipro. The greatest number of members, however, target SME customers, defined as having 100 or fewer IT users. Most MSPA members primarily conduct remote managed IT services, and manage in-network infrastructure such as servers, mobile devices, VoIP systems and desktop clients. And their SME customers typically do not have dedicated IT staff of their own.
The Green IT Program was created in response to demand both from managed service providers and customers, according to MSPA president Charles Weaver. To be certified, providers must nominate one of their clients as a green IT-approved company. That is, their client must employ at least one green IT initiative through the service provider. A popular green technology among managed service providers is server virtualization. Most SME service provider customers use just five to 10 servers for their operations, yet when they are consolidated into two or three machines via virtualization software, the energy savings may be relatively significant.
Service providers may also be green certified if they engage clients in energy-efficient remote management, such as remotely shutting down the power of desktop computers during non-business hours. This has been made possible in recent years by hardware and software such as Intel’s VPro technologies that are actually built into a computer’s motherboard. By simply turning off a computer at night, clients may save $17 per machine per month in utility bill savings. While many SMEs may not have the ability to enforce the shutting down of computers at the end of each workday, it is a relatively simple task for service providers. Another key element of green remote IT management is reducing the times when a technician must physically go to a customer site, so-called truck rolls. The advent of various remote management technologies in the past few years has enabled remote resolution rates as high as 80% to 90% among service providers.
These may seem like small measures, but given that MSPA members have a collective client base of tens of thousands of SMEs, the environmental upside is significant. Datamonitor believes that the SME market for green IT is a largely untapped opportunity among service providers and other IT vendors. The MSPA’s certification program is likely to spur greater awareness of green IT among SMEs, given the large number of MSPA members that service this market. The organization also hopes to stir up a public relations bustle in the coming weeks, including through the use of non-IT channels such as broadsheet newspapers. This may have a domino media effect.
Service providers are not the only companies that stand to benefit from the green IT certification. The vendors of their server virtualization and remote monitoring and management software and other technologies may also be boosted by the program. They include Nimsoft, N-able, Kaseya and Level Platforms, among others. While it remains to be seen whether SMEs will embrace green IT to the same degree as their larger corporate counterparts, if service providers effectively and succinctly articulate the fiscal benefits of their green IT elements then Datamonitor believes they are well positioned to capture the green IT SME opportunity.
