It is most easy and obvious to arrive at a positive RoI for green

Thanks to his business background, Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance

Communications tends to emphasise and highlight the RoI of every decision that

he embarks upon. This approach has helped him bring about major changes at one

of the largest telecom companies in India and in the world, since not many can

dispute against a great business case. Herein he shares his views on green and

what are the changes wrought by him and how. Excerpts

Has green IT moved beyond the hype?



The chief reason for the hype around green was because of the affordability

factor; unfortunately we did not have the technology available at an affordable

cost. But over the past 5-6 years we have seen a dramatic improvement in the

technologies that allow us to implement green IT initiatives within the company

without really breaking our back. RoI for green IT initiatives has come down

significantly; therefore it does not need to be sold anymore to management. We

achieve green because we are moving to better technology, by lowering our

consumption of power by better usage of space, cooling, infrastructure in

various ways. The fact is that technology has improved to make green IT a

reality today. It is something that I can do as a CIO; earlier most of us were

just talking about and around it.

Can you list down the green initiatives taken by you at Reliance

Communications?



For over one year, there has been a specific mandate for reducing

power/energy consumption across the board at Reliance Communications. Since we

are one of the largest telecom players in India our infrastructure is spread

across the place, so we have tens of thousands of towers which consume power, we

have buildings and offices across the country, and numerous data centers. All

these are major guzzlers of power. We have taken several steps to reduce the

consumption of power, for instance in the towers we discovered that by merely

reducing the time difference between the battery shutdown and the diesel or

petrol generator start-up by say five minutes, we saved immense amount of

energy. We are switching off all PCs automatically; we are also in the process

of installing power management solutions in our data centers that will switch

off unused servers. We are moving into a virtualized environment; currently our

development and testing servers are virtualized. We are also in the process of

consolidation; we aim to consolidate our five data centers into one. We are also

making a gradual shift to thin clients.

Is it hard to arrive at a positive RoI for green?



On the contrary, it is the most easy and obvious. For someone making a

business case, it all boils down to the fact, as to what is the TCO of the

investment. In green, the amount of capex is usually offset by the reduction in

opex, thus by arriving at the calculation, it provides a strong business case.

To be honest, green is no more a costly and fashionable trend, it is a by

product of good economics. In todays ecosystem, we have reached a stage where

we achieve green just by choosing the right technology,

Could IT be the driver of green within the organization?



Of course, there are many departments that can take a lead on green within

companies, it could be the administration that is directly responsible for the

power consumption, there could be the investor relations, there could be the HR.

Personally, I believe that since IT plays a major role in terms of pollution

caused by consumption of energy by the scores of servers and desktops, there is

the bigger onus on us to drive the green agenda. And since the battle for green

is fought on a technology front; we are best equipped to take charge.

Shashwat DC



shashwatc@cybermedia.co.in