Green is Good, But It's Not Magic

I had to laugh at this blog in Information Week titled “Going Green Merits Yellow Light”. I see this every once in awhile - people so caught up in the green aspects of a product that the “goodness” of the energy savings or lower impact spills over distorts their perspective. In this case the energy efficiency was somehow supposed to have made up for the fact that it was designed by a small company who apparently had some serious engineering (and, ultimately, business) issues.

For procurement, supply chains, vendor selection, etc, environmental responsibility has to be an ‘AND’, not an ‘IN PLACE OF’. Make sure that as your teams increase their focus on eco, they don’t forget the stuff that they’re already good at, like evaluating product reliability, vendor’s financial viability and product fit. If a supplier can’t meet your volume needs, all of the green-ness in the world won’t help meet customer demands.

But you can also go a step farther and get proactive. Take your best suppliers and vendors today and tell them where you need them to be in a few years. Maybe you’re a little ahead of them in thinking about green strategy. Maybe they’re putting their green emphasis somewhere that’s not as useful to you.

From our customers we’re getting more and more eco hurdles to clear in RFPs, but they’re all about what we’re doing today. Let’s talk about datacenters 5 years from now and what you think you’ll need. If you’re trying to have that discussion with us and we’re not listening, send me an email directly. We’ve got plans, but I want to make sure they’re what you need. I’d hate to miss the mark and cause our customers to have to go buy exploding computers from some fly-by-night startup….