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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).

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