Green IT gains an upside in the economic downturn: Datamonitor report

Independent market analyst Datamonitor's recently released report, Can Green IT Bloom in an Economic Downturn, shows how the economic downturn may promote green IT.
 
''The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way organisations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT,'' said Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Datamonitor and the report's author.

''The downturn has also resulted in green IT trends for datacentres, client devices and asset lifecycle management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (ROI) models,'' she added.
 
Green IT that eliminates capital expenditure is increasing in demand

Datamonitor research shows IT budgets are likely to remain flat in 2009, which means cost-effective green IT is likely to increase in demand. As such, organisations no longer regard green IT and cost-effective IT as being mutually exclusive. This represents a significant paradigm shift and bodes well for the future evolution of the global green IT market.

Restrained IT budgets also mean that green ROI models are becoming compulsory and shorter. In order for green IT vendors to satisfy new ROI requirements, they are being forced to develop more efficient and greener IT solutions.
 
Green IT is becoming more important in the datacentre
 
Flat IT budget growth also means that organisations that face critical datacentre limitations, such as a shortage of floor or rack space, are looking to software or outsourcing alternatives to building new datacentres or upgrading existing facilities. Those alternatives include IT leasing, managed services, virtualisation software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service.
 
Datamonitor believes datacentre resources will increasingly be hosted in a cloud computing environment, which should – at least theoretically – fall under the green IT banner.
 
However, the greatest demand for datacentre green IT will be for datacentre virtualisation. Datacentre virtualisation is becoming more holistic, whereby various assets, including servers, storage, communications infrastructure, and business applications, are being virtualised across a pool of datacentre hardware. Datamonitor believes business applications are the next frontier of datacentre virtualisation.