Putting the Green in Green

U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.K., I heard a lot of concern about carbon footprint. It was two years before I got that question in the U.S. 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.”

A number of standard telecom offerings can be considered green, from WAN and metro Ethernet offerings, which connect remote locations and enable collaboration, to managed telepresence and videoconferencing services, which replace costly and polluting business trips. But only recently have some service providers begun to include a green message in their marketing.

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 for 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.”

Verizon Business recently announced enhancements to its telework offering to make it easier for businesses to let employees work at home and potentially save money on office space. Those enhancements use IP Centrex, an existing service, to allow employees to work from home or from the road more seamlessly. The idea is to get businesses thinking differently about their workspace, Kimm said.

“Many people might not need a specific place to sit in an office,” Kimm said. “For example, in the first six months of last year, there were 32 business days when I spent at least an hour in my office. So do I really need my own office? When I'm in the place where my office is, I need a phone, a network connection and a printer relatively near to the people I collaborate with, but dedicated office space is archaic. ‘Hoteling’ is the future.”

Voice over IP is an underlying enabler for this new way of working because office workers can enter a four-digit code into any telephone on any desk and it becomes their extension, Kimm said.

“Hoteling plays to a whole set of services which we offer,” Kimm said. “If you are going to have a flexible space, you need a modern WAN infrastructure. You need security — having [virtual LANs] that are specific to their function. You might need a wireless LAN so that anyone in the office can work from where they are sitting. And you need IP telephony so you can log into a phone and that's your number or log into a Web portal and set it up so the phone next to you rings. We didn't develop these services with a green message in mind but they work that way.”

Selling services designed to save enterprises money on office space and utility costs means engaging new people in the sales process — the ones in charge of the real estate budgets, Kimm said.

Making these kinds of changes is not an overnight fix, said BT's Moss, and they require a cultural change that is as important as the physical changes.

“It comes down to changing our approach from work being a place you go to work being a thing you do,” Moss said. “When work is a place you go to, everyone has a location that is their office or cube area that is defined as their space. When work is a thing you do, it's about enabling you to work most efficiently wherever you are.”

One such cultural change is getting executives and sales people who are accustomed to business travel and face-to-face meetings to accept videoconferencing and other collaboration substitutes, Moss said. Workers who associate their importance in a company with how often they travel may be disturbed by such changes. “Unless you change cultural values and give people the tools to be as comfortable on [videoconferences] as they are face-to-face, then changes won't be permanent,” he said.

There also are new requirements for the IT staffs of companies that let their employees work remotely, Moss added. “You are delivering something different — especially with teleworking,” he said. “It's no longer about plugging them into the LAN at the office; it's getting them a second circuit at home, getting a phone delivered to them, helping them with connections. It can mean working with a different set of vendors.”

Interestingly, Moss said, many companies that come to BT assume they will be able to make major savings in their data centers, and while that's possible, there are many other places where services can provide much greater savings.

“The bulk of the carbon footprint doesn't come from the data center; it comes from other operations,” Moss said. “The contribution of [information and communications technologies] to the global carbon footprint is 2% to 3%. But the amount of the footprint due to real estate or vehicle fleet is 10% or even 20%.”

BT Americas helped a vending machine company cut its fleet costs by 25%, using wireless devices that tracked what machines needed to be refilled and what exactly was needed to cut down on restocking trips and make sure trucks carried only what was necessary, Moss said.

Moss and Kimm agreed that the green sale also is a much more customized offering, based on the specific needs of a specific business, and service providers have to get closer to their customers to really understand what the best options are for saving energy and saving money.

“What we are always trying to identify is that intersection between where something is good for the business and good for social responsibility and sustainability,” Moss said. “If it's not good for both, then it's charitable and philanthropic and you are continually having to ask companies to do it.“