AppClarity is not a Software Asset Management tool

A software asset management tool (SAM) provides end to end life-cycle management of your software assets, essentially from procurement, through to license allocation, maintenance as well as wind down.

From a license compliance perspective these tools will identify what is deployed in your estate and hence what your license liability is.  Sounds great and you tick the box from a vendor compliance perspective but what if you are not actually using the software?  Are you licensing something merely for the sake of compliance that actually provides no business value?

SAM tools are often complex implementations that take months to set up and the ‘business value’ that you receive at the end of the day is a report telling you that you need to pay more money to your software vendors.  Sound familiar.

AppClarity is none of these things.

What does AppClarity do?

AppClarity is designed to uniquely highlight software that is not being used.  It reports on this financial waste and also allows you to reclaim licenses with reclaimer technology.  AppClarity analyses all the applications deployed in your environment across all of our deployed PC’s.  It does this with zero impact on your existing infrastructure and is an agentless solution.  All we need is Microsoft SCCM deployed in your environment, nothing more, nothing less.

The organisational benefits of AppClarity are very simple:

• Licenses can be reused where they are needed, avoiding expenditure wasted on buying new licenses
• Top level view on deployed software & actual license use
• License compliance is much simpler
• Savings are often achieved within one month

In conclusion, gone are the days of clunky software asset management tools, AppClarity provides real business value, really quickly!

According to a report by computer manufacturer Lenovo, “Green PCs for a Smarter Future”, manufacturers are increasingly looking for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, resources consumed and waste generated.

The information and telecommunications technology industry generates about 2% of global carbon emissions every year, according to “Green IT: A New Industry Shock Wave”, a report by technology research firm Gartner.

Of this figure, computers and monitors account for 39% of carbon emissions, equivalent to a full year of emissions from about 43.9million passenger vehicles, Lenovo said.

The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has set a target for average global carbon emissions reductions of 5.4% relative to 1990 levels by 2012. The 17th Conference of the Parties to this framework, COP17, which starts in Durban a week from tomorrow, will debate whether to extend the agreement beyond 2012, or enter into its second phase.

South Africa has pledged to slash 34% from its carbon emissions by 2020 and 42% by 2025.

Enter green computing: the design, manufacture, use and disposal of computing devices in a way that is not detrimental to the environment. Green computing practices were primarily introduced by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 with the launch of the Energy Star programme, a consumer guide to the energy efficiency of products.

For manufacturers to earn the right to use the Energy Star label, their products must meet energy use guidelines in three distinct operating modes: standby, sleep mode and while computers are being used.

Products bearing the Energy Star label saved US consumers enough energy in 2010 to avoid greenhouse gas emission equivalent to that from 33million cars, while saving them almost $18-billion in utility bills.

But South African businesses are not following suit. Tim James, director at SustainableIT, a green information technology software and services provider, said business and IT organisations had yet to fully embrace the opportunities that green computing brings.

“Very little has been done beyond virtualisation and teleconferencing solutions. Business demands cost reductions and science demands an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 to limit global warming to 2°C. Technology adoption can go a long way towards achieving both these goals,” said James.

“In South Africa, information technology needs to be better embraced by business leaders to reduce their business emissions and costs, and ensure sustainability in their business operations.”

A study developed by The Climate Group and the Global eSustainability Initiative estimated that green computing could cut global annual emissions by as much as 15% by 2020, delivering nearly an eight-fold benefit when comparing carbon use to carbon reduction.

NextGen Research, the emerging technology arm of ABI Research, defines a “green” computer as one that is built from eco-friendly materials and features low power consumption and computer power management capabilities. It has fewer and smaller components, generates less heat than previous models and is packaged in recyclable materials.

NextGen Research said purchases of green computers will grow from less than a sixth of the $249-billion computer market in 2009 to nearly two-thirds – more than $190-billion – of the projected $323-billion computer market in 2013.

On the supply side, environmental campaign group Greenpeace International keeps a stern eye on electronic manufacturers through its monthly “Guide to Greener Electronics”, ranking them on policies and practices to reduce their carbon footprint, produce greener products and make their operations more sustainable.

The top three highest-ranked computer manufacturers for November were HP at 5.9 out of 10 points, followed by Dell at 5.1 and Apple at 4.6.

Source: Business Times 20 November 2011

These revelations urged the IT industry into action and energy efficiency, recycling and total cost of ownership has become the order of the day.  The questions we should be asking, however, is: how much do we really waste within IT and how do we identify this waste?  Green IT is moving beyond energy and emissions to a more holistic view of the IT service and how business efficiencies can be driven both internally and externally to the IT operation.

For this discussion, let us limit our focus to the IT department, as the waste elimination opportunity is staggering.

Latest estimates indicated that in the last 5 years $8 trillion has been spent on information technology around the globe.  That is more than half the annual GDP of the United States.  The reality is that this cannot all be invested efficiently as 70% of this cost is spent on maintenance of new and existing infrastructure.  How much of this spend is waste and how much can be eliminated?  Surely a tech savvy IT department in tough economic times should be trying to eliminate as much of this unnecessary spend as possible?  Well, are they?

Recent research highlights some very interesting facts.  15% of servers in an organization are doing nothing useful at all, resulting in $25 billion in waste.  50% of PCs are left on 24×7, wasting around $2.8 billion in energy costs in the US alone.  Analysis carried out on some large corporates in South Africa indicates that these figures of PCs left on overnight are in excess of 80% in most large organizations. There is also an average of about $400 of unused software on every corporate PC which is licensed because you think you need it, but it is actually never being used.

So we now know that we have all this waste, but what are we doing about it?  The short answer is nothing.  We should, however, be placing more focus on waste elimination and we can do so through the deployment of technology specifically designed to highlight and eliminate waste.  For example, enterprise class PC power management technologies have been on the market for over 10 years. These power down PCs overnight and wake them up the next morning. Simple? Yes.

In the licensing space, emerging technologies are being designed to highlight what you are wasting rather than the traditional approach of seeking out what you have deployed, and hence what licenses you need to purchase.  This is a very subtle difference in approach to license management but results in massive savings when renegotiating your enterprise license agreements.

Other major cost areas are people costs involved in software deployments and OS migrations, much of which can be eliminated through smart technology and automation.  The examples above are just scraping the barrel of where waste is prevalent. The reality is that the list goes on and opportunities for reduction exist.

In South Africa, business and IT organizations have yet to fully embrace the opportunities that green IT brings, but waste elimination in these tough times has to be a no-brainer.  Very little has been done beyond virtualization and teleconferencing solutions.  Business demands cost reductions and science demands an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050 to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.  Technology adoption can go a long way towards achieving both these goals.

The Smart 2020 Report, released in late 2008, illustrated how the adoption of ‘smart’ technologies could reduce global emissions by as much as 15% by 2020.  In South Africa, with aggressive government reduction targets and the next climate change conference imminent and on our doorstep, information technology needs to be more fully embraced by business leaders to reduce their business emissions, reduce their costs and ensure sustainability in their business operations moving forward.

By Tim James Director, sustainableIT 

Source: IDG Connect, 14 November 2011

Leading South African short-term insurer improves manageability of PC estate and stands to save 146,000 kWh of electricity per year – the equivalent annual electricity use of 20 homes

Cape Town, 10 November, 2011 - 1E (www.1e.com), the global leader in Efficient IT solutions, today announced that it has been selected by OUTsurance (www.outsurance.co.za), to improve patch management and save energy across its estate of 2,000 desktop PCs. The deployment will be handled by 1E preferred business partner, sustainableIT (www.sustainableit.co.za).

“Our staff would often not reboot their machines. In some cases, machines had not been rebooted for more than 50 days, which was clearly impacting patching and performance. This was when we realized that enough was enough and we needed to do something,” says Simon Faragher, OUTsurance project manager.

“We selected NightWatchman® Enterprise from 1E because we needed a proven solution for reliable patch management. Our number one goal is to keep our PCs healthy and available, while guaranteeing zero user disruption, so it was the obvious choice,” continues Faragher.

WakeUp from 1E is a feature of NightWatchman® Enterprise, which reduces the burden of administrator support while maintaining Computer Health™ to ensure that users always remain productive. It is a Wake-on-LAN solution that enables rapid deployment of patches across a network out-of-hours and automatic routine maintenance and software distribution.

“The C0₂ savings we stand to make as a result of automatically shutting down our PCs was an additional reason for our purchase decision. We stand to save 145 metric tonnes a year – that’s the equivalent emissions from the average annual electricity use of 20 homes,” concludes Faragher.

Initially, OUTsurance ran a test on 1,678 machines over a period of 20 days. The solution helped the insurer see that 33% of desktops and 3% of monitors were being left on overnight, wasting energy unnecessarily. It also showed that 29% of desktops and 4% of monitors were being left on, but only 11% of PCs are actually used, during the weekend.

Tim James, director at sustainableIT, says: “It’s rewarding to see the deployment of NightWatchman Enterprise help OUTsurance solve its immediate need to improve patch manageability across the organization, save money and positively contribute to its own corporate C0₂ emissions reductions.”

Source:PRWeb

About 1E

Globally over the past five years $8 trillion has been spent on IT, which is more than half the US GDP. Maintaining this huge amount of IT accounts for 70-80 percent of each year`s IT budget. CIOs want to reduce this figure to save money or to have more discretionary spend, but lack the tools to do so. 1E is the pioneer and global leader in Efficient IT solutions. 1E`s mission is to identify unused IT, help remove it and optimize everything else. 1E solutions help reduce servers, network bandwidth constraints, software license bills, energy consumption and many time consuming IT tasks. Some of world`s most prestigious names feature among 1400 organisations using 16 million 1E software licenses to reduce their IT maintenance bills while providing a more responsive service to their users. For more information, please visit www.1e.com

About OUTsurance

OUTsurance has established itself as the leader in the direct insurance market offering car insurance, home insurance and business insurance.  OUTsurance has now also expanded its product offering into the life insurance market, offering cover in case of death, disability or critical illness. For awesome service and affordable insurance premiums that will suit your budget, get an insurance quote from OUTsurance. For more information, please visit: www.outsurance.co.za

 About Sustainable IT

SustainableIT is based in Cape Town, South Africa. The company is a pioneer in the Green IT and sustainable computing market and was recognized by Global Industry Analysts (Green IT Services – A Global Strategic Business Report, June 2010) as a key global player in this emerging market. For more information, please visit http://www.sustainableIT.co.za 

The solution, said to be the first of its kind in South Africa and developed by local consultancy sustainableIT, provides organisations with the ability to manage and report on their carbon emissions at a fraction of the cost of traditional consultancy based approaches.

How does it work?

TheCarbonReport.com is a cloud based offering which guides an organisation through an intuitive process and builds an emissions inventory based on the globally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Reporting and Accounting Standard.

The offering is priced as an annual subscription which varies based on the complexity and size of the organisation and provides not only the ability to capture a carbon inventory but also to report on it through a fully featured reporting tool.

A ‘walk through tour’ is also offered at no charge which gives users the ability to evaluate the solution before signing up to the service.

The solution also offers validation of metrics as well as certification of audits if required.

This is not another calculator

Teresa Legg, director at sustainableIT describes the solution as ”not just another calculator”. “What we have done with The Carbon Report is build an intuitive toolset that allows organisations of any size or complexity to build an auditable carbon inventory and report on it. There are few, if any, tools out there that do this as simply or as cost effectively as we have managed.”

Reporting is done with strict adherence to the GHG protocol and has been developed in such a way that ownership of the process can be retained internally.

The calculation and reporting complexity of traditional footprinting has been absorbed within the tool so as not to confuse the end user but still deliver a quality report as output.

Broaden the base

The offering is aimed at organisations of any size or complexity. “Every business has to start focusing on the triple bottom line of people, profit and planet”, explains Legg. “Understanding your carbon footprint provides a measure of your impact and allows you to develop concrete plans to reduce emissions and ultimately eliminate unwanted costs in your business”, she concludes.

The process of carbon footprinting just got a lot easier and business needs to start focusing on emissions reduction opportunities if it is to remain globally competitive in a rapidly changing low carbon economy.

Visit The Carbon Report here to get started.

This is the view of Gianmarco Lorenzi, MD of Cleardata, a paper shredding and recycling company, who says South African businesses lag behind Europe in terms of reducing their reliance on paper.

“With paper in varying forms still playing an integral role in our daily lives, it seems the format is here to stay and the paperless society remains a distant realisation of a fully-digital future,” says Lorenzi.

Financial, healthcare and the manufacturing sectors, in particular, are globally producing over 4.5 trillion pages of hard copy annually, according to Lorenzi.

“Technology has played a significant role in ‘mythicising’ the paperless society rather than diminishing the use of paper. Technology has actually enhanced it, as witnessed by the creation of e-mail – which alone has increased the global use of paper by 40%,” he notes.

Legislation not ‘green’

Lorenzi also notes that the Internet, as well as tablet devices such as the iPad and wireless printing applications, has made document editing on PDF and e-mail simpler and easier to print, and the rise of tablets has contributed to the interest in printing.

“Paper consumption was actually far less in the days of the typewriter when typists carefully considered each letter, as one mistake meant retyping the entire document.”

Lorenzi says business processes and interactions are still heavily driven by paper. “Paper-based documents simply carry more authority as once something is committed to paper, it is deemed final and it cannot be changed or modified as easily as an electronic document.”

He points to paper-based copies of contracts, ID documents, proof of physical address, which is often required when a person performs basic transactions such as opening a bank account.

New regulations such as RICA have added to the paper consumption problem, as original documents are required as proof of identification.

“Unfortunately, this means the potential environmental benefit of a paperless society is not being felt.”

Smart thinking needed

Lorenzi advises businesses to set additional security on their printers. “If an employee prints a document, they would need to enter a code to print a document.”

However, he says while companies can reduce their paper consumption, there is no getting away from the fact that business needs paper.

He says recycling is not only an environmental consideration, as new data protection legislation such as the Protection of Personal Information Bill will enforce companies to adopt information destruction practices that are aligned with recycling.

According to Lorenzi, nearly four billion trees or 35% of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries the world over.

Lorenzi indicates that SA’s paper recycling ranking is still poor, trailing behind countries such as Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Norway. “In a drive to encourage recycling, the US paper industry has set a goal to recover 55% of all the paper used in the country by 2012.

“More South African businesses need to follow this example by adopting a culture of paper recycling, which is sometimes as simple as placing paper recycling bins in high paper usage areas, such as near a printer or photocopy machine.”

Some merit

On the other hand, Tim James, MD of SustainableIT, believes technology exists today which will make the ‘paperless office’ a reality.

“Unfortunately, due to ways of working, legal requirements around records retention, and immaturity in technology adoption, we are still some way off. I think future business will dictate that it will eventually become a reality.”

James says legislation needs to support e-formats and e-signatures. “In many instances, this is not the case and legislation dictates the business requirement. There is no reason why legislation couldn’t insist that an e-format was the only legal form of storing information. In fact, the exact reverse of what is happening today.

“SARS has made significant progress with the e-filing platform and is a shining example of what is possible through using the e-channel. Quite simply, government needs to provide the correct business environment to support this.”

Research by the World Wide Fund for Nature says the total paper consumption is expected to rise from a current 400 million tonnes to between 450 million and 500 million tonnes by 2020.

Source: ITWeb 5 July 2011

The IT industry uses a lot of power. It’s arguable that its entire history is determined at a fundamental level by the properties of electricity. Processors have gone multi-core because single cores have cooling problems at higher speeds, some peripherals such as display adapters have their own cooling units for the same reason, there’s a massive global shift to virtualised infrastructure for power and efficiency reasons, and datacentres have been redesigned to be as efficient as possible.

One of the biggest wakeup calls was published in 2007: a study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that estimated that the US spent nearly $3 billion in 2005 keeping its datacentres on and cooled and that the world in total spent $7 billion. But since then, datacentres, by far the hungriest consumers of power, have gone virtual.

David McMurdo, sales and business unit manager for enterprise server and storage at HP SA, says that unit counts – the number of boxes shipped – from Q1 2007 through to Q4 2010 haven’t changed.

“There’s been no change up or down. We can say that the virtualisation trend has kept the unit count constant.”

Tim James, director at Sustainable IT, says that although the unit count has stayed the same, utilisation has increased.

“You are using more of each server. A normal server sits at 15 percent utilisation; a virtual one is up around 75 percent.”

Chris Norton, regional director for southern Africa at VMWare, says the saving isn’t as big as everyone thinks.

“The metric is that an idle machine still uses 70 percent of the power requirements as a fully-utilised machine,” he says. “A study in 2009 shows that there are more virtual machines than physical ones, so one would expect the size of the physical footprint to come down over time. But the trend we’ve seen is that people are looking to save power so they can fit more servers in the datacentres, not to be good corporate citizens. Companies run out of physical power on the grid and they have two options then: build another datacentre in another location, or use their existing resources more efficiently.”

Barry Hatfield, business development manager for cloud services at Internet Solutions, agrees that it’s all about efficiency in the local market but there’s also another key reason.

“I think specifically in the Johannesburg area, there’s only so much power available in certain areas. In our datacentre, we’ve put in cooling technologies and are becoming more efficient. That is a green initiative but the driver is so we can put more racks down.”

Dan Engel, regional sales manager for Polycom, says the reasons for going green vary from country to country and should be driven by governments.

“Once a government gives tax relief benefits because a company is able to show that it’s green, it becomes not just a CIO issue but a CEO and CFO issue. When the government is pushing it, then adoption is much faster.”

Sean Wainer, country manager for Citrix SA, says it won’t be driven by government in South Africa but purely by capacity.

“The fact of the matter is that our utility does not have the ability to provide the power required. So our adoption is not going to be driven by rebates but by demand. We need to build datacentres and we need to power them. Our utility isn’t going to come up with clever ways of supplying more power.”

HP’s McMurdo points out that green IT isn’t coming through in procurement either.

“It’s not a requirement on a tender. The typical ones are there: processing power, memory, storage and so on, but there are never questions about power requirements, recycling and re-use. We’ve just shipped an order to government and it was all about price and capacity. It’s tough for hardware vendors who invest a lot of R&D in lowering power consumption and government takes no notice. The hosting providers are charging by kilowatt but outside that, not much.”

Dell SA’s Kobus de Beer, product marketing for enterprise products, says the efficiency drive by vendors has been prompted by the IT industry’s carbon footprint.

“We did a study that showed that the IT industry generates more carbon than the airline industry. That’s why there’s so much research from the hardware vendors, so see if you can consolidate 180 servers into 22.”

Sustainable IT’s James says he’s seen companies starting to be quizzed on their environmental track records.

“Some of the big corporates are starting to drive that. That means smaller suppliers have to report that because the bigger companies have voluntary requirements to be greener. But we’re miles away from it being driven from government.”

VMWare’s Norton says that modern hardware and software has efficiency and green elements built in already because they source technology from global vendors.

“So to go greener in this country, it’s really just a light bulb that has to be turned on somewhere. I think government should be involved in the same way that BEE is a government initiative. In the manufacturing and IT sector, there should be a similar one. For every server you take out, you’re removing one and half tons of emissions per year. Until government make it a requirement, other companies won’t make it a requirement to do business with them.”

Cultural considerations

HP’s McMurdo says that the culture in the office is important. Laptops with docking stations still draw power if plugged in overnight.

“Our offices here aren’t that intelligent. There are no IT systems working the buildings, shutting off things when they aren’t needed. We can’t just focus on the datacenter, we have to get the culture everywhere.”

The technology does exist – Polycom’s Engel calls it basic functionality.

“In our offices in Israel, a relatively warm country, we have motion sensors connected to the lights and the air conditioning. This is something you can implement and save immediately on the electricity bill.”

Citrix’s Wainer asks whether that sort of culture is driven bottom-up or top-down.

“Is it a company’s responsibility to enforce green or is it a personal thing to unplug your power supply?”

James says he’s seen more than 90 percent of corporate desktops stay on 24/7 and a quarter of laptops stay in the office over the weekend.

“To be honest, there is technology to power stuff up and down when it’s needed. We just don’t get it in this country. We’re in the Dark Ages from that point of view.”

Ereeza Ryland, chief marketing officer at Powertime, says it should be a top-down thing.

“You have to build it into your mission statement. But IT can be used as the enabler for this: software and hardware sensors can be used to measure everything right up to buildings and infrastructures.”

Gus Pinto, brand manager for Fujitsu at Di-Nostix, has some examples.

“One of the things we have is zero power devices. When the device goes into standby mode, the power goes down. That also works for AC adapters, notebooks and docking stations. The minute you walk out of the office, click – it’s off. But this has to be adopted from the top down otherwise most people won’t bother.”

IS’ Hatfield says the easiest driver is cost.

“We don’t build datacentres based on how many racks we can fit in, we build them based on how much power we can get into a site. Clients who use more power in their racks get charged for that. Those clients are very aware of what their kit is drawing. Those are the people who start looking for more efficient solutions.”

Dell’s de Beer agrees that culture change can be nudged in the right direction by cost.

“When there are budget issues or interest rate hikes, we start pushing. We turn off our geysers. At companies, when things get tight, IT guys ask how much power they can save. But from a culture point of view, we’re just not there yet. I’m just as guilty. I don’t recycle and I’ve investigated putting in a solar geyser at my home for the last seven years and wondered about the ROI.”

June Julyan, sales director at Bateleur, says cultural attitudes are heavily influenced by knowledge – or lack of it.

“I don’t know, for example, whether leaving my cellphone charger plugged in draws power or not. You start discussing that at the office and someone will say it’s a fallacy. Someone pooh-poohs it then it gets pushed away.”

Coming changes

But despite the ad-hoc nature of most South Africans’ attitudes towards greener policies, there is at least one document pushing for more sustainability: the King III report. Sustainable IT’s Tim James says corporates are starting to take more notice.

“King III mentions corporate sustainability and it’s definitely starting to get onto the agenda of CIOs and CEOs. They’ve heard about it and they don’t know what to do about it, just that they have to tick the box. And it really is just box-ticking at this stage. But the reality is there are big cost savings. The technology has it built
in already.”

Powertime’s Ryland notes that power costs are going up by 25 percent per year for the next three years.

“If a company goes over a certain usage, they will be penalised. Perhaps we should be looking at which department uses more power.”

Norton says it comes down to gluttony.

“There’s over $140 billion worth of excess server capacity out there in the industry. That equates to a three-year supply to the industry. We’re running way more technology than we really need. Most organisations provision for the peak. Instead, they should be provisioning for the average and outsourcing the peak to the cloud.”B

Source: Paul Furber, Brainstorm Magazine, April 2011

Shutting down corporate PCs during non-work hours is expected to save Sanlam more than 1,5 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year and eliminate 1,545 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions — equivalent to the electricity required to power 125 average South African homes.  As a result of the power downs, Sanlam also expects to see annual energy cost savings of close on R1 million per year.

Powering ICT equipment is a significant portion of a company’s energy costs, particularly in financial services where technology is pervasive.  According to industry analysts Gartner, the majority of this energy use is attributable to PC’s and monitors and so PC power management tooling is the logical first step in Green IT initiatives.

Sanlam ITISS  needed a solution to integrate its existing IT environment, allowing the wake up of machines after hours, ensuring software updates are deployed seamlessly and automatically whilst controlling desktop PC power use more effectively”, commented Abdurrauf Sonday, Head of End User Computing at Sanlam ITISS . “NightWatchman is a best of breed power management solution and ticks all the boxes both in terms of technical integration and functionality”.

The solution will centrally control the power settings on Windows desktop computers to reduce energy waste and ensure consistent policy across the PC estate.  A managed shutdown of computer systems not in use, especially overnight and on weekends, will be implemented to further reduce energy usage.

NightWatchman will also ensure that all desktops connected to the Sanlam network are awake or woken up to receive software updates after hours, decreasing end user downtime during working hours due to software installs and reboots.

Tim James, director at sustainableIT, 1E’s local business partner, said: “sustainableIT is proud to work with Sanlam ITISS on this project. The deployment of NightWatchman reflects Sanlam’s commitment to find sustainable business solutions that not only help the company reduce costs and improve its environmental impact, but also streamlines business operations from an ICT perspective.”

Powering down idle IT equipment during both peak and non-peak times is one way that corporate citizens can reduce energy consumption. The company is working to further enhance energy performance and reduce energy consumption in company buildings, data centres and IT systems.

9 March 2011

END

The maturity assessment enables comparisons around Green IT activities across industry sectors and against peers, giving ICT departments a perspective on how they are tracking and where they should be focusing their efforts. It seeks to quantify current best practices and to better understand the role that ICT is taking in enabling sustainable business activities.

The solution which is delivered at no charge via sustainableIT’s website provides a report which gives a number of valuable insights into the comparative performances of ICT organisations. It takes respondents through a series of questions which rank companies based on Green Intent, Current Implementation, Adoption, Funding and Action.  It also provides insight as to where a company ranks against nine key Green IT initiatives.

“Whilst Green IT has been highly topical in the last two years, real progress and action has been very slow” says Tim James, director at sustainableIT. “Many companies are battling to come to grips with where their energy should be focused.  The Fast Benchmark service allows organisations to get a perspective of where they are, how they compare against their peers and provides clear direction around Green IT strategy”, James elaborates.

Many opportunities from an ICT perspective exist in terms of reducing cost, co2 emissions and energy.  These range from PC power management and printing in the distributed environment to virtualisation, cloud computing and datacentre optimisation at the back end.  The question is where does one start, and what needs to be done?

“Partnering with sustainableIT offers British Worldwide Computing a niche set of skills that understands not only the South African market, but also how sustainability and computing is intrinsically interlinked”, commented Martin Jackson, Managing Director of BWC. “We expect this strategic partnership to go from strength to strength”.

With the advent of King III, integrated reporting requirements and the increasing focus on energy and costs, ICT departments can no longer ignore sustainability.  This is rapidly moving up the priority list on the CIO’s agenda.  Fast Benchmark provides a valuable tool to get an organisation started.

END

To access the benchmark tool click here

Sanlam has announced that it is deploying NightWatchman PC power management from 1E on 5,500 desktop computers across its operations to help improve energy efficiency and reduce its environmental impact.

Shutting down corporate PCs during non-work hours is expected to save Sanlam more than 1,5 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year and eliminate 1,545 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions — equivalent to the electricity required to power 125 average South African homes.  As a result of the power downs, Sanlam also expects to see annual energy cost savings of R960,000 per annum.

Powering ICT equipment is a significant portion of a company’s energy costs, particularly in financial services where technology is pervasive.  According to industry analysts Gartner, the majority of this energy use is attributable to PC’s and monitors and so PC power management tooling is the logical first step in Green IT initiatives.

“We needed a solution to integrate with our existing IT environment that would allow us to wake up machines after hours, ensuring software updates are deployed seamlessly and automatically whilst controlling desktop PC power use more effectively”, commented Abdurrauf Sonday, Head of End User Computing at Sanlam. “NightWatchman is a best of breed power management solution and ticks all the boxes both in terms of technical integration and functionality”.

The solution will centrally control the power settings on Windows desktop computers to reduce energy waste and ensure consistent policy across the PC estate.  A managed shutdown of computer systems not in use, especially overnight and on weekends, will be implemented to further reduce energy usage.

NightWatchman will also ensure that all desktops connected to the Sanlam network are awake or woken up to receive software updates after hours, decreasing end user downtime during working hours due to software installs and reboots.

Tim James, director at sustainableIT, 1E’s local business partner, said: “sustainableIT is proud to work with Sanlam on this project. The deployment of NightWatchman reflects Sanlam’s commitment to find sustainable business solutions that not only help the company reduce costs and improve its environmental impact, but also streamlines business operations from an ICT perspective.”

Reducing energy consumption during non-peak hours is one way Sanlam is striving to minimize the environmental impact of its operations.