HP Builds Portfolio Of Services For Energy Efficiency And Sustainability

HP said on Thursday that it's rolling out an array of nine different consulting services that are all designed to help enterprises and other businesses significantly improve energy efficiency and adopt environmental sustainability practices. The services, developed in conjunction with various partners, are focused not just on data center operations but on building facilities and improved supply chain management.

The HP Energy and Sustainability Management (ESM) solution delivers a strategy, road map and implementation plan for assessing how energy is used and what can be done to cut down energy usage, reduce a customer's carbon footprint and create a more environmentally sustainable operation. Previously, companies like HP featured energy efficiency in certain points of the data center, such as improved performance per watt in servers or energy-efficient server cooling technology, but ESM is a more holistic approach to the problem.

The ESM service is also more focused on solutions that appeal to chief financial officers of companies by helping document return on investment (ROI) from improved efficiency and sustainability, says Jay Allardyce, worldwide director for growth initiatives, energy and sustainability management at HP. "It's not just about being green for [the sake of] being green. It's more than just sustainability as a best practice," says Allardyce. "We are able to bring those strategic consulting services and viewpoints at a senior management level with business-driven insights and the ROI-based conversation that clients are looking for."

Among the services included in the ESM portfolio are the following: a workshop with cross-functional positions in an organization to understand goals and set objectives; developing a road map for reducing energy use and greenhouse gases; developing a baseline understanding of energy use and greenhouse gas production to measure progress; analyzing more efficient use of water resources in an enterprise; and analyzing identified trade-offs that may achieve environmental goals but impact business goals.

The value of the ESM program is also that it focuses more broadly on an enterprise's operations, including facilities operation and supply chain management, and not just its IT infrastructure, adds Ken Hamilton, worldwide director of  energy and sustainability management in technology consulting at HP."We're looking ... for opportunities to be able to take advantage of tax incentives or incentive programs from utilities, but across those asset classes rather than siloed, as they are typically done today," says Hamilton.

The telephone network equipment company Avaya is already using HP's ESM program, although currently only to improve facilities management, says Wilson Korol, sustainability business leader for the company.

"We've been able to identify hot spots practically in real time and to address issues, Korol said in an interview. "We're moving from getting the data to acting on the data, and so we're ongoing in that process right now."

HP works with enterprise software company Hara to deliver ESM services to businesses like Avaya, which has set a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 15 percent by 2015, says Amit Chatterjee, chief executive officer and founder of Hara. "We can help enable companies like Avaya to understand the size of their footprint--is it a bread basket or a barnyard--and identify opportunities to see a large reduction," Chatterjee says.

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