Now just in case you think I have turned into some sort of ‘tree-hugger’ since I last posted, I found some interesting articles this week on how companies are trying to run environmentally friendly B2B infrastructures.  We all know that the politicians are working hard to persuade the automotive industry to develop environmentally friendly cars in order to try and reduce green house gases etc.  We also know that EDI helps to reduce paper based transactions,  again cutting down on the number of trees being used!, but how many people know that one of the topics getting on the agenda of today’s CIO is how green the IT environments are of the vendors supplying their companies? 

The following article from silicon.com, Virtualisation Powers Up Energy Group, reviews how E.ON, one of the world’s largest gas and electricity suppliers, is using a Virtualised B2B infrastructure across their global business. This has resulted in them using 56% less power than their previous B2B environment due to the unique way in which the B2B infrastructure is able to call on extra processing power as and when it is required.  In addition, by consolidating their numerous IT infrastructures across multiple divisions into one environment, they have seen a 50% reduction in their operating costs.

Just in case you thought that it was just the energy companies that are keen to show a green side to their business, as I mentioned earlier many CIOs are taking this seriously now as well.  Again over on silicon.com, I found this article, CIOs Dump Environmentally Unfriendly Suppliers,  which discusses how today’s CIO are taking green issues seriously even when deciding which IT suppliers to work with.  So it is interesting to think that many CIOs in the past were focused on how much cost savings or business improvement could be realised by working with a particular IT vendor, but now they have to demonstrate how green their solutions are as well! One of the companies mentioned in this article is LDV (Leyland DAF Vans), a leading UK manufacturer of commercial vehicles, they said that every supplier they work with, either for production or non-production purposes is assessed for environmental performance.

This is an area which I had never really considered before, from a B2B infrastructure perspective, and LDV seem to be leading the way in terms of defining a strategy for using green suppliers for their IT and B2B environment.  LDV are a relatively small company but can you imagine what would happen if one of the top three North American automotive OEMs started to implement a global ‘green’ strategy for their IT environments around the world.  I am sure some are already starting to think about or are already implementing green IT sourcing strategies, but there doesn’t seem to be much information out there on exactly what these companies are doing. 

GXS has recently upgraded their data centres around the world, our new high availability B2B infrastructure called Trading Grid® Ultra is based on a virtualised environment running on Blade servers from eGenera.  This provides us with a highly flexible environment where we can use as much or as little processing power as our customers require.  In addition the new data centre infrastructure takes up less floor space than the old one and hence requires less lighting and power in the room!, OK the reduction in lighting may be a minor detail but it all helps to reduce power consumption in our data centres.  The entire Ultra infrastructure uses new state of the art servers, storage devices and network routers. As a result, our customers’ B2B transactions are flowing across one of the most efficient data centre infrastructures available today.  In addition, our Outsourced B2B or Managed Services customers can be rest assured that they are using B2B solutions hosted within the same environmentally friendly B2B infrastructure. 

So I have to pose the question to anyone reading this blog, how green is your B2B environment and what steps are you taking to make it more efficient?

OK, time for me to drive off into the sunset, may be I should think about buying one of these VW camper vans, often associated with environmentally friendly communities. This one however has had it’s petrol engine replaced by an all electric drive powertrain system!