Green IT Takes Center Stage at CeBIT

Published March 02, 2009

Last year's CeBIT conference in Hanover had a noticeably green hue: Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer pushed energy efficiency in a keynote speech, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative launched a European-focused green IT program, Greenpeace released an environmentally oriented ranking of OEMs at the show, to name just a few events.

This year's gathering will likely leave all those announcements in the dust.

When the nearly 500,000 expected attendees arrive at the show this week, they'll find a greatly expanded area for CeBIT's Green IT World showcase arena.

The Green IT World will showcase five areas key to improving IT's environmental performance: data center and chip technologies, IT innovations, communications and mobile applications, and green IT strategies and consulting. A fifth area, centered on telepresence and videoconferencing, highlights IT's potential for reducing environmental costs of other areas of business operations.

About 20 organizations will be presenting and exhibiting in the green IT section of CeBit, including Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, IBM, Nokia Siemens, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and others.

In the run-up to the conference, a handful of companies have unveiled new projects or products aimed at greening IT: Netgear launched a line of new, energy-efficient switches for small and medium-sized businesses; Fujitsu Siemens announced that its new Esprimo 7935 business desktop will use zero watts when it's turned off, and which includes an 89-percent-efficient power supply; and SAP unveiled new software products and organizational changes to help address environmental, health and safety concerns both within SAP and among its clients.

CeBIT runs from March 3 to March 8; CeBIT has also published a green IT e-book highlighting the demand for green, available online at CeBIT.de.

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Green IT Takes Center Stage at CeBIT

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