When the world’s economy improves, companies worldwide are poised to spend increased amounts on IT outsourcing, according to a recent Gartner survey. Eighty-five percent of nearly 1,100 organizations in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific regions say spending for external services will rise more than 7 percent.
Respondents were surveyed earlier this year, when sentiments were optimistic about a pending recovery. Most respondents predicted economic recovery during 2010.
Allie Young, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said the recession was clearly felt by organizations who reported increased contract renegotiations with external services providers. She noted that the majority of organizations will increasingly turn to external providers to support IT strategies when the recovery occurs.
Respondents told Gartner the overall mean average for outsourcing spending is predicted to increase to 7.13 percent. However, there is a great degree of variation in different countries. Indian users, for example, expect an increased spending of 17.4 percent, while Japanese users foresee a decrease of 1.5 percent.
Talk about cause and effect! When CIOs become responsible for paying a company’s power bills, energy use in the data center can drop dramatically.
That’s the message from Dean Nelson, the senior director of global data center services at eBay, to a group of IT managers at the recent Uptime Institute Symposium in New York. “When CIOs are paying the power bill, they really understand the impact of the decisions being made,” he stressed.
While most CIOs don’t see their companies’ power bills, eBay includes them with regular IT expenses and, as a result, has witnessed a “very aggressive” drop in power consumption. The drop has been so profound that eBay was able to pay for its newest data center – a $287 million facility in Salt Lake City – through savings achieved in lowered power costs over the past two years, Nelson explained.
As a result, eBay now considers its IT department to be “self-funding” due to greater efficiencies in power spending, Nelson said.
You can now follow the construction of our new green data center on Facebook. We’ll post photos and the occasional video as we make good progress toward completion. This week they started excavating an enormous hole behind the building for the rainwater containment system that will support the Indirect Evaporative Coolers on the roof. Take a look!
A new article in Sustainable Business Oregon says new research finds that the greening of data centers will ramp up over the next five years, with companies increasing their investment from $7.5 billion last year to $41.4 billion by 2015. It specifically mentions the new Facebook data center being built in Prineville as well as EasyStreet’s own expansion now underway.
EasyStreet’s Rich Bader is quoted as saying, ”I did the calculations and the electricity we’re saving is equivalent to eight train car loads of coal each year. That gives you a sense of scale.”
Click here to read the entire piece.
CEOs around the world are saying IT solutions are necessary to improve sustainable business practices, according to a study from the United Nations Global Compact, an initiative encouraging businesses to adopt more sustainable and socially responsible policies.
The study also showed that the overwhelming majority — 93 percent — of nearly 800 CEOs surveyed now believe their companies’ success depends on some form of effective sustainability management. Eighty-one percent of the CEOs say their companies have implemented sustainability strategies, and most agree the worldwide recession is putting an unprecedented emphasis on sustainability for conserving resources and controlling related costs.
Energy-cost reduction — coupled with the uncertainty of the current economy — is now considered a survival measure, the survey showed.
