Mid-Market Companies Want to Be Green, Too

Published: March 17, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While it may be true that the largest companies in the world have the most immediate need to get their energy and cooling houses in order, so to speak, a new study of mid-sized businesses commissioned by IBM shows that midrange companies want to be green, too.

The study, which was done by Info-Tech Research Group and which you can read at this link, was put together based on interviews with over 1,000 IT executives who work at companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees. The companies were located in Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which is a pretty good cross section of the developed economies.

The Info-Tech report indicates that within the next 12 months, nearly two-thirds of the companies polled plan to roll out virtualization in one form or another on their server platforms. Nearly as many are planning to consolidate storage systems or retrofit their server rooms so they are more efficient. About 25 percent of the companies polled have already completed some kind of server virtualization or storage consolidation project, and another 50 percent said they would do one or the other (or both) in the next year.

The main drivers for such consolidation projects, according to the study, are the ones you hear about every day: companies are running out of compute or storage capacity, but they have to cut costs to meet the budgets in this down economy. In many cases, midrange shops are wrestling with the same power and cooling issues that larger data centers have. Which makes sense. If you have a 2,000-square-foot data center with X amount of power and no way to get more power and no way to get more room, you have exactly the same problem as a 200,000-square-foot data center with 100X of power available.

"This study demonstrates the clear connection between meeting environmental goals, reducing expenses and driving change that can foster innovation and growth," explained Marc Dupaquier, general manager of global midmarket sales at Big Blue. "IBM offers services, hardware and software that can help midsize companies be both greener and leaner."

Dupaquier, you will remember, was once the general manager of the Business Systems division, the one that is supposed to be rolling out the Smart i appliance based on i 6.1 and Linux later this year.

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