Going Green: AT&T’s broad approach

Home management services, in general, present an opportunity because the home environment, with more appliances and home entertainment centers, is getting more complex, Rice said. “One of the bigger next challenges for the industry is the home,” he said. “There are few standards for the home, and what is deployed there is becoming very sophisticated. Unless you are CIO for the home, it is hard for average user to get the various elements to work together. What we look to do is create a managed service that takes complexity out of the home. We don’t want to roll more trucks -- all that does is generate more greenhouse gases.”

AT&T’s approach to environmental protection “is all tied together,” Rice said, and includes such things as conducting its own meetings via telepresence.

“We had a 10-site meeting using the telepresence exchange with about 50-60 people in those sites all day long,” Rice said. “It was one of most effective meetings I’ve had in a long time. We did that internally, with our internal people as well as our own suppliers.”

As a member of the Green Grid, AT&T will learn more about best practices and industrywide recommendations on technologies that improve energy efficiency in data centers. AT&T is also working as part of ATIS, which Rice chairs, to develop telecom-specific standards and metrics to drive the cost out of operating telecom networks and data centers. Separate of those two efforts, AT&T also is providing data center data to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to aid in its effort to develop EnergyStar ratings for data center equipment.

Everything AT&T learns from its own internal efforts to be a better environmental citizen can then be shared with its customers, Rice said. That opens the door to different forms of managed data center services, which makes more efficient use of the technology.

“As we look at consolidation of our own IT data centers, as we do our own rationalization, with the elimination of applications, we can apply that as we go out and talk to our large enterprise customers,” Rice said. “Even in the medium or larger companies, everyone building their own data center isn’t efficient.”

Previous efforts to promote other environmentally friendly practices such as telecommuting didn’t always work – at least in the ‘80s when AT&T first tried – but the mindset today is different, Rice said.