Earlier this month Ovum, the UK-based analyst firm published a report showing that many businesses and organizations are missing out on the benefits of using power management on PCs. We were thrilled to see CSCI members – who are global leaders in driving the wide scale adoption of power management — included in the report and equally glad to see that the report highlights the huge financial and environmental savings organizations can realize by implementing power management systems.

If you’re reading this article, you may be wondering “what is power management and what’s the big deal?” This a great question and one I answer frequently when talking to people and organizations about CSCI’s mission and the benefits of membership. Power management controls the amount of energy your laptop or computer uses when it’s not in use. Power management controls are already loaded on your computer and with just a few clicks can be implemented in minutes. Depending on the cost of energy in your area and the age of your computer, implementing power management can save you up to $60 a year on your electricity bill. It’s an easy way to save money and an even easier way to do your part to help save the environment.

But the Ovum report looks at how enterprises are using power management and highlights how many organizations are ignoring the environmental and bottom-line benefits that wide scale deployment of power management can deliver. If using power management on just one computer at home can save up to $60 a year in energy costs, imagine what the savings could be if an enterprise has hundreds or thousands of computers running power management systems. The environmental and financial savings would indeed be huge. In fact, Ovum found that enterprises were overlooking energy consumption savings of up to 40% by not implementing power management across the organization.

So why would enterprises miss out on such huge environmental and financial savings? According to findings by Ovum at least some of the hesitation enterprises have about deploying large-scale power management is based on false perceptions, one of which is that power management systems may interfere with core IT processes. And while members of our power management workgroup have worked collaboratively to address this perception, it was great to see that none of the vendor products Ovum looked at for their January report caused any interference with IT operations or maintenance.

It is clear however, that barriers – both real and perceived – are hindering the wide scale deployment of enterprise power management systems. But I’m pleased to say that CSCI members are leading the charge in helping to ensure these barriers are eliminated. And I’m equally pleased to say that our Power Management workgroup moves quickly to address new issues as soon as we learn about them from members and from the global information and communications technologies (ICT) community.

During the last several months our power management workgroup has held productive roundtables throughout North America and in Europe with the number one goal of helping to ensure that software and power management can always work seamlessly together. These events have brought CSCI power management experts together with developers and enterprises to address a wide variety of power management issues and have been extremely successful in helping to move enterprise power management systems forward.

As we move full-speed-ahead into a new year, we’ve made increasing the adoption of power management on laptops, PCs and servers a top focus area for 2012. And with 700 corporate members from around the world and over 11,000 people joining as individuals by pledging to use power management at home and at work, were moving quickly to increase the well over $2 billion in annual energy costs we’ve helped the global ICT industry save through the use of power management and more energy efficient computing.

Hats-off to Ovum for helping to educate businesses and organizations about the benefits power management can deliver. And here’s to an ever increasing number of people and businesses leveraging power management as an important tool for meeting a variety of energy saving and sustainability goals.

 

About the author – George O. Goodman is the Executive Director of Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Follow and interact with Goodman on Twitter at @gogoodman.

Originally published in EarthTechling (a CSCI member) on January 30th, 2012