Green IT gains an upside in the economic downturn

The current global economic recession has squeezed IT budgets, hindered
capital expenditure and generally slowed the growth of IT development. However,
according to a report just published by Datamonitor, 'Can Green IT Bloom in an
Economic Downturn', it may also prove to be a significant upside to the market
for green IT.

“The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way
organizations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT,” said Rhonda Ascierto,
Senior Analyst, Datamonitor and the report's author. “The downturn has also
resulted in green IT trends for datacenters, client devices and asset lifecycle
management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (RoI) models,” she added.

Current green IT investments are driven by compliance with environmental
legislation and cost savings. In particular, green IT that eliminates the need
for capital expenditure (capex), such as data center virtualization, data center
design and layout, and asset lifecycle management, has become increasingly
important as IT budgets remain constrained.

Datamonitor research shows IT budgets are likely to remain flat in 2009,
which means cost-effective green IT is likely to increase in demand. As such,
organizations no longer regard green IT and cost-effective IT as being mutually
exclusive. This represents a significant paradigm shift and bodes well for the
future evolution of the global green IT market.

Restrained IT budgets also mean that green RoI models are becoming compulsory
and shorter. In order for green IT vendors to satisfy new RoI requirements, they
are being forced to develop more efficient and greener IT solutions.

Flat IT budget growth also means that organizations that face critical data
center limitations, such as a shortage of floor or rack space, are looking to
software or outsourcing alternatives to building new datacenters or upgrading
existing facilities. Those alternatives include IT leasing, managed services,
virtualization software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
However, the greatest demand for data center green IT will be for data center
virtualization.

(Source: CIOL)