Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Greenpeace scorecard documents greener enterprise offerings

Greenpeace's latest 'Cool IT' report highlights technology products that help other industries go green

Technology companies are not just making their products less carbon-intensive; they are also increasingly designing products to improve energy efficiency in the industries that they serve, according to the latest in a series of Greenpeace ratings of the sector's energy practices.

The international environmental organization gave its most favorable ratings to Silicon Valley stalwarts Cisco Systems and Google as well as to Swedish mobile vendor Ericcson, U.K. mobile company Vodafone and Japanese hardware company Fujitsu.

Cisco earned praise largely for its EnergyWise software, which manages energy consumption of connected devices. Google led the pack in use of renewable energy to power its server farms.

The recent trend toward cloud computing has led to spikes in the technology industry's power usage and Greenpeace said much of that power still comes from dirty sources like coal and diesel. The organization is pushing the industry to offset the resulting carbon emissions by using renewable energy.

The report also notes that the technology sector has backed away from earlier efforts to lobby for cleaner energy nationally.

Technology companies "aren't weighing in," said Gary Cook, Greenpeace's IT analyst. "They're leaving debates to the traditional energy companies, who are very happy with the status quo. But that's not in the IT sector's interest. It has a lot of money that could be made with a transition to a more efficient economy."

One notable exception is the Japanese mobile company Softbank, whose CEO called for Japan to move to renewable sources of energy after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in April.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Cisco, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Google, Softbank, Technology, Vodafone

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: at&t, Cisco Systems, environment, Ericsson, Google, Green data center, hardware systems, IBM, oracle, servers, Softbank
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Key Considerations in Modernising Your Backup and Deduplication Solutions
    There is a definite need for better data backup solutions in today’s enterprise data centers. The question is whether to continue with software-only backup and deduplication solutions, or to make the move to a purpose-built backup appliance with deduplication capabilities. This paper provides a structured approach to assessing the advantages of the appliance model. Read this whitepaper.
    Learn more »
  • Oracle Database 11g for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
    Oracle Database 11g is a comprehensive database platform for data warehousing and business intelligence that combines industry-leading scalability and performance, deeply integrated analytics, and embedded integration and data-quality -- all in a single platform running on a reliable, low-cost grid infrastructure. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • IDC Forecast: Worldwide Purpose - Built Backup Appliance 2011 – 2015, Forecast Update: Explosive Growth in 2011
    This IDC Forecast Update provides share positions for revenue and raw capacity for nine named PBBA vendors for the first half of 2011. In addition, this study provides the market size and a five-year forecast for the worldwide PBBA market as part of IDC's Storage Solutions coverage. The five-year forecast includes total factory revenue and raw capacity in terabytes through 2012. The worldwide PBBA market covers both open system-and mainframe-attached products.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.