On the seventh day of UC the industry gave to me overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.
This is all about going green. How could anyone that reads a paper or goes onto the Internet not see the issue of green initiatives as a hot topic? My day seven wish is the second, along with assistive technology, that is about companies doing more to promote what they have or are doing. Day seven is that companies talk more about their green initiatives because we don’t hear enough about them. If we don’t hear about it, then customers don’t hear about it, and in order to go green customers need to be able to make intelligent choices when choosing vendors. In fact, Siemens recently held a webinar, entitled “The Green Contact Center – Making “Green” Work for you”. In it they held a poll with the question “Do you believe that a significant number of customers would be positively inclined to buy from vendors who publicly demonstrate a commitment to the Green initiatives?” Approximately 95% responded yes. Therefore, day seven is a wish to hear about green.
How does this apply to unified communications? In lots of ways I found out. I also found out that almost every vendor I talked to either had corporate green initiatives, green white papers, or statements about what they are doing that is environmentally friendly. In fact, at Cisco’s analyst briefing – C-Scape, last week I even sat at a table topic lunch table that was completely focused on green. In general I found a lot of interesting things out from talking with vendors, from just corporate policy to architecting products to be more environmentally friendly.
Some green things involve both unified communications and a green mentality. Take the concepts of hot desking and teleworking. In a recent article San Jose Mercury News article, companies such as HP and Cisco have implemented hot desking where employees no longer have their own desk-office-cube, but come into work and plug into an open desk. It might take a bit of getting used to, but besides the change in the way that people work, it cuts down on office space requirements, and energy, and allows employees to work part time at the office and part time at home, further saving energy.
Of course, within the contact center (which certainly is a user community within UC) companies sometimes use remote agents, which has the dual benefit of not only cutting down on office space requirements, and carbon emissions from commuting, but allows companies to hire part-time workers that might not be able to work in an office. In the Siemens webinar they use the following scenario to demonstrate the carbon footprint calculations for a contact center:
• 100 agent contact center
• 14 miles average commute (each way)
• 250 work days per year
• Carbon rate = 0.3 Tons per 1,000 miles
• 100 agents = 70,000 miles per year
• Tons of CO2 = 210
(Example calculations were derived from Climatecrisis.net)
Siemens further fueled this (had to say that) with calculations for the agents leading up to an average of 233 hours a year per agent in commute time and $840 a year in gas (which is probably low at this point).
In the seminar they also pointed out that to make remote agents most effective, contact centers can use UC applications, including conferencing, collaboration and presence to avoid travel for meetings and training, to facilitate informal social contact with virtualized work teams, and to share knowledge and skills in real-time to improve customer service execution.
Among these are efforts to physically reduce power consumption in equipment such as servers and switches. ShoreTel, for example, introduced their new ShoreGear voice switches that doubles the number of users, cuts the space footprint in half, and consumes 20% less power. In one of those white papers I mentioned seeing, NEC writes about how a thin client strategy can reduce an enterprise’s energy bills by 30-90%. The white paper, entitled “The Color of Money, “green value in thin clients translates into real dollars and sense”, talks about NEC’s Virtual PC Center (VPCC), and lays out the business case for a thin client strategy that will save no costs and the environment.
From an end user standpoint, some of these green efforts will be noticeable. For example, Mitel’s 5340 telephone has a back lit display that lowers when the user hangs up, reducing power consumption 80 watts to 8 watts.
Finally, in addition to being a fabulous productivity tool, and a way to improve work relationships, video is a truly green technology. For example, from when I first wrote about Cisco TelePresence back in July when I posted the numbers of meetings Cisco has done using Telepresence and the number of trips they have reduced those numbers have soared. Last week they reported to the analyst that they have held 42K meetings in a year using TelePresence – 9K of which avoided travel, and cut companywide travel by 5%. CEO, John Chambers said that he was on the road 50% of the time last year, and using TelePresence, will double the number of customers he meets with next year, yet cut his travel in half.
As I’ve written before, iLinc, a web conferencing and collaboration company, promotes green through the use of its Green Meter, so that companies using iLinc conferencing can measure their CO2 savings.
There is tons (but not of CO2) of information out there on green initiatives. My wish is for it to be much more visible to the industry and customers in 2008.