Bad economy may help environmental push

US enterprises are still willing to go green – if it saves them money. So service providers that recently started marketing the environmental benefits of many network-based services such as telepresence and telework are now emphasizing the money to be saved in real estate and power costs and the productivity gained by enabling mobile workers to be more efficient.

To some extent, the economy is helping, said Kevin Moss, head of corporate social responsibility for BT Americas.

"We are actively helping our customers understand how our services can help improve their carbon footprint," Moss said. "I don't think the economy has made that message harder – if anything, it has helped. There is nothing that we work on in the environmental space that doesn't help them economically."

While European businesses have been thinking about carbon footprints for some time now, most US service providers only saw those concerns raised in this country within the last year or two.

"Those who did a lot of global sales heard about it in Europe first," said Chris Kimm, vice president of solutions engineering for Verizon Business. "In the UK, I heard a lot of concern about carbon footprint. It was two years before I got that question the US. Now we hear about it regularly. It's not uncommon that it is something that they raise proactively. There's been a slight de-emphasis with the recession because there are other imperatives – it's not that the environment is not on their minds but they are looking at it through a slightly different lens. Before, power savings and consumption reduction was a goal unto itself that might have a green benefit; now it's more finding every possible way to cut costs."

An AT&T spokesperson said the company "doesn't offer anything" specifically to help enterprises go green. Most other service providers contacted said environmental benefits are part of the sale for some services but not usually the leading pitch.

"We include it in the value positioning we do with customers," said Bob Meldrum, vice president of corporate communications at TW Telecom. "Many are concerned about green initiatives, but I would say that the more important concern today is with increasing efficiencies to become more productive -- lowering their total costs of network ownership and improving their [return on investments].  Becoming more ‘green' is a desirable addition to their network spend."