by Mary Caplice

I was reading an article today from Forrester (‘Q&A: The Economics Of Green IT’) about how companies can not only save money by going green, there may also be government incentives and utility company programs to help them.  They may even incur penalties in some regions for not going green in certain areas. This article suggests that there are very compelling reasons for IT leaders to educate themselves on local incentives and penalties.  Some green projects require an upfront cost that will pay off later, some require none.  For example, GE expects to save millions just by turning on Windows features like standby and hibernate!  IT can save capital and operating expenses, cooling costs, DBA time, facility square footage  and  license fees for both hardware and software by retiring applications that are being kept alive in case they’re needed down the road for regulatory and compliance reasons.   There’s even a secondary market for that retired hardware!  One way to go about application retirement is to invest in HP Database Archiving software (excellent ROI potential is discussed in my recent blog ‘Death and Taxes- Maybe one can be avoided’).