Are Solution Providers, VARs and IT Consultants Ready for Environmental Certifications?

As the green IT certification concept starts to gain momentum across the industry, various companies are investing in cleaner, less power-hungry products and employing business practices that reduce carbon footprints.

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You could say it’s springtime in IT: The seeds are being planted for a harvest that will produce technology that is cleaner and more efficient, thereby saving users money on energy and putting less stress on the environment.

A handful of solution providers are striving to develop green business models. Tech Networks of Boston, for instance, is developing a tool that measures power consumption at customer IT environments that the solution provider plans to use internally and make available to other solution providers for free. The tool will evaluate things like whether to replace power supplies with more efficient units and whether to replace physical with virtual servers.

“As you’re evaluating these different solutions, this tool will help you keep the impact on the environment in mind,” says Tech Networks' President and CEO Susan Labandibar.

Vendors, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, are working to develop products that use fewer computing resources and energy while launching programs to help their partners adopt green practices.

Distributors are also taking up the challenge. Ingram Micro on August 5 launched a service in partnership with nonprofit Green Electronics Council that helps solution providers easily identify products that pass the environmental test. The distributor is using the council’s EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) to rank the green credentials of applicable products on its database.

Furthermore, CompTIA (The Computing Technology Industry Association) trade group, which has implemented a range of technical certifications for IT workers and companies, is planning to take up the concept of a green IT certification, or accreditation, in coming months, according to its new President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux.

Thibodeaux envisions the implementation of an accreditation modeled after CompTIA’s Security Trustmark, which recognizes a vendor neutral set of standards for security business capabilities and processes.

“There is no reason why that wouldn’t very easily translate into a green IT trustmark,” Thibodeaux says. CompTIA, he adds, will form a commission before the end of the year to study the creation and implementation of green IT certification or accreditation.