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Chan­nel Register is car­ry­ing a story about some new For­res­ter research into IT buy­ers’ atti­tudes to greener products.

In a sur­vey of 124 IT buy­ers in North Amer­ica and Europe, they found good news in that 85% said green factors are import­ant. How­ever only 25% had writ­ten green cri­teria into pur­chases and only 15% were aware of vendors’ green initiatives.

For­res­ter senior vice pres­id­ent Chris­topher Mines said:

We heard two reas­ons why green mat­ters: effi­ciency and cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity. Most IT decision-makers told us that a green pur­chase would only hap­pen in the con­text of cost reduc­tion. These are hard-headed, ROI-driven busi­ness decisions.

Now of course we have to be care­ful because this a pretty tiny sample size spread across mar­kets which have quite dif­fer­ing atti­tudes to any­thing green. But if we take it as rep­res­ent­at­ive should we still agree that actu­ally it’s all down to cost?

If this was true then we could expect that all IT pur­chases (green or not) would go to the cheapest vendor. This of course is not the case. There are a range of factors that come into play. And, as the sur­vey shows, it is still the case that most vendors have not made cus­tom­ers suf­fi­ciently aware of the green options or the wider benefits.

There are often effi­ciency bene­fits to green products. Tra­di­tional PCs for example use shed-loads of power – and power isn’t cheap. They also gen­er­ate loads of heat which then requires air con­di­tion­ing to cor­rect (more power). Many are massively over-spec’d for their users (big­ger pro­cessors, more heat, more power, more cost).

A single PC left on all day is respons­ible for about 1,500 lbs of CO2. Greener altern­at­ives use less power and gen­er­ate less heat (sav­ing around £50/$100 per com­puter per year). They cre­ate less car­bon to start with and off­set what little there is. And they are com­par­able on price. That’s before we get to the cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity part of the equation.

Pretty com­pel­ling. Now if only the mes­sage could be com­mu­nic­ated effect­ively (call us if you need some help).

Basic­ally this all means that the hard-headed, ROI-driven busi­ness decision often is a green one (and that there is a huge oppor­tun­ity in the market).

We all know that the pace of change today is get­ting faster and faster. It’s almost incom­pre­hens­ible to me that going back a couple of dec­ades or so, when I first got into tech­no­logy, there was for most people no inter­net and no mobile phones. PCs were just get­ting star­ted prop­erly (my first PC had no Win­dows OS, an awe­some 30Mb of hard disk space and floppy disks as big as your head). And if you wanted to find some­thing out, your local lib­rary was prob­ably the best bet.

To put where we are today into some con­text, take a look at the fol­low­ing video:

While the pre­dic­tions will undoubtedly be false as they always are, the exist­ing stats on their own are pretty impress­ive. The one that got me: if myspace was a coun­try, it would be the 11^th largest in the world.

One of the things that this drives home is that flux is a per­man­ent state of affairs. There is no cer­tainty about any­thing – and all the focus groups in the world will not provide the answers. Everything is in beta and the suc­cess­ful com­pan­ies of tomor­row will be those that chart their own des­tin­a­tion but who also remain flex­ible about exactly how they get there.

This is the age of plan B.