Putting Global Services to Work in Green and Cost-Effective Ways
Whether you're a global IT solutions firm or a company with relatively simple IT needs, there are some simple steps that can be undertaken to streamline your computing infrastructure and save costs and emissions at the same time.
Despite the darkness of the economic climate, more people -- and businesses -- than ever are showing their concern about the Earth's climate by taking action.
For me, the double whammy of "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore and Thomas Friedman's latest book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" sent me on a rampage to minimize my family's carbon footprint. After insulating our home, unplugging energy-sucking idle electronics, buying green power from our utility and looking into our own solar system, I realized that a solid 43 percent of my personal footprint came from business travel for my company, Cognizant.
Fortunately, at the same time I was addressing my personal carbon footprint, my involvement in Cognizant's sustainability initiative began to pick up speed. I have been an advocate and executive sponsor of my team's "Green IT" initiative, in which for the last 18 months we have used virtualization and consolidation to address the energy consumption of Cognizant's data centers and computing environments. We have virtualized over 350 servers in our data centers to reduce server energy consumption, and we have seen a 35 percent drop in server procurement.
Even while these efforts were under way, I realized that, as with at so many companies, news about environmental impacts and environmental improvements doesn't necessarily travel far within the company. In order to get a sense of how deep our efforts had gone, I reached out across the organization to learn more about the various green initiatives going on within Cognizant.
As a knowledge-based business, Cognizant is not considered a heavy contributor to greenhouse gases compared with other "heavy" industries. But with 61,700 employees (and growing), many working in our large development centers in India, China, and Latin America, we understand the significant impact Cognizant can have with respect to reducing carbon emissions globally.
? In November 2008, Cognizant formalized its "Go Green" initiative, a program that is being led by our largest delivery center in Chennai, India. Go Green is a cross-functional initiative involving Facilities, HR, IT, Marketing, and each of our business units, whose mandate is to coordinate numerous sustainability projects that span various groups across Cognizant. Our first steps for Go Green include the development of a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions policy, measuring our total GHG inventory, then setting targets to reduce those emissions through organizational changes and employee education.
In a short time, we've already made some significant early progress in reducing our carbon footprint. Three new campuses in Chennai, Cochin, and Kolkata have been designed to meet LEED certification for green buildings, and at other facilities we're undertaking projects to reduce air conditioning use and energy consumption.
We're also working hard to make it easy and desirable for our employees to take mass transit to work. We currently offer bus services to 80 percent of our employees, and we've optimize those buses' travel routes by 20 percent to reduce traffic congestion and pollution.
But at Cognizant, information technollogy is our job. To that end, we're taking on some significant efforts to make our IT operations more efficient and cost-effective. We have:
One example: I normally conduct an offsite meeting in India with my management team each fall to formalize plans for the coming year. This year, we conducted a "Virtual Offsite Meeting" instead, using Microsoft Live Meeting and some creative facilitation techniques to virtually bring together 25 of my managers from around the globe. My team was initially skeptical about this approach, but after the meeting, all agreed it was very effective. Not only did it save them valuable travel time, but it also reduced the time they are away from their families -- although they hope that we still will conduct occasional face-to-face gatherings for the team-building benefits they provide This is one small step, but we hope that by building on this concept and documenting our approach, we can share the results within Cognizant so that they can also help us improve it.
Our employees and internal customers have been extremely supportive of these efforts since they have experienced little or no reduction of service and appreciate the environmental benefits and cost savings generated. In fact, server virtualization has helped make us more responsive in providing new development environments to our business units.
One of the biggest challenges has been measurement. Many of our older facilities lack internal energy metering so it's difficult to determine the specific benefits that things like PC Power Management or Server virtualization have provided. We can use devices like the "Kill A Watt" or "Watts Up" to manage individual device power consumption, but to measure the aggregated benefits has been difficult. We are able to see reductions in our monthly electricity bills, but sometime it is difficult to isolate the benefits of each specific program. We are working to rectify this by adding additional electricity meters, investing in more sophisticated building management systems, and building an Energy Dashboard to provide greater visibility into energy trends and the benefits of our conservation efforts.
Many of our clients are on a similar green journey, and some are way ahead of us. Just as we're embarking on knowledge-sharing within Cognizant and among our clients, we'd appreciate hearing about the lessons you've learned, successes, and case studies as your companies work to conserve energy and move to renewable clean energy sources.
Have you had success in reducing your energy costs? Have you installed solar panel or wind turbines at one of your facilities? Please feel free to post your experiences in the comments below, or send me an email; my address at the bottom of this article.)
Mark Greenlaw is Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Cognizant. He can be reached at [email protected].
For me, the double whammy of "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore and Thomas Friedman's latest book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" sent me on a rampage to minimize my family's carbon footprint. After insulating our home, unplugging energy-sucking idle electronics, buying green power from our utility and looking into our own solar system, I realized that a solid 43 percent of my personal footprint came from business travel for my company, Cognizant.
Fortunately, at the same time I was addressing my personal carbon footprint, my involvement in Cognizant's sustainability initiative began to pick up speed. I have been an advocate and executive sponsor of my team's "Green IT" initiative, in which for the last 18 months we have used virtualization and consolidation to address the energy consumption of Cognizant's data centers and computing environments. We have virtualized over 350 servers in our data centers to reduce server energy consumption, and we have seen a 35 percent drop in server procurement.
Even while these efforts were under way, I realized that, as with at so many companies, news about environmental impacts and environmental improvements doesn't necessarily travel far within the company. In order to get a sense of how deep our efforts had gone, I reached out across the organization to learn more about the various green initiatives going on within Cognizant.
As a knowledge-based business, Cognizant is not considered a heavy contributor to greenhouse gases compared with other "heavy" industries. But with 61,700 employees (and growing), many working in our large development centers in India, China, and Latin America, we understand the significant impact Cognizant can have with respect to reducing carbon emissions globally.
? In November 2008, Cognizant formalized its "Go Green" initiative, a program that is being led by our largest delivery center in Chennai, India. Go Green is a cross-functional initiative involving Facilities, HR, IT, Marketing, and each of our business units, whose mandate is to coordinate numerous sustainability projects that span various groups across Cognizant. Our first steps for Go Green include the development of a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions policy, measuring our total GHG inventory, then setting targets to reduce those emissions through organizational changes and employee education.
In a short time, we've already made some significant early progress in reducing our carbon footprint. Three new campuses in Chennai, Cochin, and Kolkata have been designed to meet LEED certification for green buildings, and at other facilities we're undertaking projects to reduce air conditioning use and energy consumption.
We're also working hard to make it easy and desirable for our employees to take mass transit to work. We currently offer bus services to 80 percent of our employees, and we've optimize those buses' travel routes by 20 percent to reduce traffic congestion and pollution.
But at Cognizant, information technollogy is our job. To that end, we're taking on some significant efforts to make our IT operations more efficient and cost-effective. We have:
• Instituted a PC power management program to put our desktop PCs in hibernation mode after-hours, which we estimate will save an estimated 18.75 million kWhs of electricity annually as well as $2.5 million in costs per year.Beyond the hardware and software of our business, we're also putting into place collaborative meeting tools to reduce the need for business travel (and cut my own carbon footprint down quite a bit). Through video conferencing and soon telepresence, which we plan to deploy later this year, we think we can achieve a 10 percent reduction in our travel, and cut down our Scope 3 carbon emissions by 2,800 metric tons annually.
• Initiated a data center consolidation project that will reduce overall data center energy consumption.
• Implemented print management solutions to reduce print paper consumption by 30 percent with print quotas and two-sided printing automation. We have also implemented firewall virtualization and have consolidated VIOP Call Managers to serve multiple locations with a single switch. Both actions reduce the number of devices drawing electricity and requiring air conditioning.
• Launched a desktop virtualization pilot, which has great promise in reducing the electricity consumption of our nearly 50,000 desktops.
• Begun plans to aggressively adopt Cisco's recently announced Energywise product to reduce the power consumption of our 35,000 Cisco phone handsets in India.
One example: I normally conduct an offsite meeting in India with my management team each fall to formalize plans for the coming year. This year, we conducted a "Virtual Offsite Meeting" instead, using Microsoft Live Meeting and some creative facilitation techniques to virtually bring together 25 of my managers from around the globe. My team was initially skeptical about this approach, but after the meeting, all agreed it was very effective. Not only did it save them valuable travel time, but it also reduced the time they are away from their families -- although they hope that we still will conduct occasional face-to-face gatherings for the team-building benefits they provide This is one small step, but we hope that by building on this concept and documenting our approach, we can share the results within Cognizant so that they can also help us improve it.
Our employees and internal customers have been extremely supportive of these efforts since they have experienced little or no reduction of service and appreciate the environmental benefits and cost savings generated. In fact, server virtualization has helped make us more responsive in providing new development environments to our business units.
One of the biggest challenges has been measurement. Many of our older facilities lack internal energy metering so it's difficult to determine the specific benefits that things like PC Power Management or Server virtualization have provided. We can use devices like the "Kill A Watt" or "Watts Up" to manage individual device power consumption, but to measure the aggregated benefits has been difficult. We are able to see reductions in our monthly electricity bills, but sometime it is difficult to isolate the benefits of each specific program. We are working to rectify this by adding additional electricity meters, investing in more sophisticated building management systems, and building an Energy Dashboard to provide greater visibility into energy trends and the benefits of our conservation efforts.
Many of our clients are on a similar green journey, and some are way ahead of us. Just as we're embarking on knowledge-sharing within Cognizant and among our clients, we'd appreciate hearing about the lessons you've learned, successes, and case studies as your companies work to conserve energy and move to renewable clean energy sources.
Have you had success in reducing your energy costs? Have you installed solar panel or wind turbines at one of your facilities? Please feel free to post your experiences in the comments below, or send me an email; my address at the bottom of this article.)
Mark Greenlaw is Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Cognizant. He can be reached at [email protected].
