Intel® vPro™ Technology

Power Efficiency and Sustainable Information Technology

Factors Influencing IT Professionals

The findings discussed here are based on data collected from semi-structured, on-site interviews with 28 IT professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom during August and September of 2007. We questioned participants about their current practices of energy conservation and about their views on using monitoring technologies to lower the energy consumption of client PCs. The businesses were in a variety of industries, including banking, insurance, manufacturing, government, and education. To be selected for the study, participants had to have indicated during screening that IT was strategically important to their businesses. The US sample included 18 US businesses in Denver and San Diego. The UK sample comprised 10 businesses in London. About an equal number of participants were selected from small (30-99 managed PCs), medium (100-499 managed PCs), and large businesses (1000 or more managed PCs).

Cost Savings
The primary driver for energy efficiency in for-profit companies is to save money. In conversations with IT professionals, we found that they often cited savings within 10 to 15 percent as being meaningful for client PCs. We found a general trend in the interviews that indicated that the larger the business, the more likely the IT personnel believed a system for client PC energy efficiency would be worthwhile. When IT professionals were responsible for thousands of client PCs, they said that multiplying the benefit of saving a relatively small amount of dollars or Euros across thousands of PCs would be something they could show to upper management as constituting a meaningful cost savings.

For small and medium business, IT professionals believed that they could make little financial difference by saving power on relatively few devices. Even if a feature of technology could make policy enforcement and monitoring reliable and easy, the cost savings would not add up to enough to make it worthy of consideration.

In many businesses, we found that it can be difficult to account for energy consumption costs, and IT professionals are generally unaware of the cost of electricity needed to run a PC. IT professionals in some small and medium businesses said they rent office space as part of a package that includes utilities. IT professionals in these situations have difficulty using cost savings as an argument for energy-efficient technology, because the business would not save the money directly. Moreover, the savings involved would likely not be enough to justify renegotiating leases with landlords. Even in large enterprises, since electricity consumption is part of operational expenditures, and IT is part of capital expenditures, it may be difficult for IT organizations to get credit for conserving electricity.

Governmental Regulation
IT professionals in London more often cited possible future governmental requirements as a driver toward client PC energy efficiency, though the topic did occasionally come up with US IT professionals also. In the US, IT professionals sometimes expressed a desire to comply with Energy Star, a US government program that sets standards for the energy efficiency of products. There was a general perception across groups in both the US and London, that, over time, government regulations would compel them toward greater client PC power efficiency.

Looking Green from the Outside
We also found that companies with an outward-facing public relations (PR) strategy and companies with users who could observe their client PCs firsthand often believed there was an advantage in presenting a “green” image to the outside world. Knowing that a green image might influence purchase decisions, IT professionals in these companies thought a visible program of energy efficiency, such as a special logo on the PC, could be financially beneficial because of its good PR. This logo could be from a government agency or some other organization that sets a well-known standard for energy efficiency.

Feeling Green from the Inside
Like people in many other occupations, IT professionals often have a personal commitment to save energy based on their own environmental philosophies. In our study, we found that some IT professionals perceive their company’s energy usage as having a direct impact on the environment, so they feel that by helping to reduce their company’s energy consumption, they are helping to reduce greenhouse gases. Technology that reduces client PC energy consumption, therefore, appealed to these individuals, even if there were no tangible, economic benefits for the business.

IT Usage Requirements for Energy-Efficient Client PCs
Our research found that in order to make an energy-efficient client PC enticing to IT professionals, there were certain requirements and conditions that had to be met:

• Return on investment was top of the list. IT professionals have to do more work with fewer resources all the time, as they are pressured to reduce costs. Any additional tasks, including energy-conservation efforts, must show a return on investment. IT professionals want to enforce simple, basic, power-saving rules in relation to client PCs, such as reliable off or hibernation states at night and limited alerts, mostly just monthly reporting.
• Energy savings cannot hinder perceived performance for users. The PCs need to come out of sleep states quickly, and power-saving policies cannot lower perceived performance.
• Users don’t usually give much time or attention to IT professionals: they just want them to keep their PCs running well and not interfere too much with their work. IT professionals often have to persuade users to allow them to install software patches, or they need to get users to adopt certain usage behaviors. None of these things are easily done, so making users aware of how a PC may behave in relation to a power-saving feature is just an additional training issue with which they have to contend, and it is something that draws their attention away from other IT concerns.
• Energy solutions must be integrated into other manageability solutions. Power monitoring should be implemented with enterprise manageability solutions such as those provided by original equipment manufacturers, operating system vendors, and independent software vendors.
• Metrics are important. IT professionals need explicit measures of how much energy they can conserve, and if it’s not at least 10-15 percent, they’re not interested.
• The focus of our study was desktop PCs, not notebook PCs. Client PC energy conservation has limited relevance to notebook PCs, except to the extent that some notebook PCs are being used as desktop PCs. IT professionals did not want to try to control energy consumption of remote users or users whose computers run on battery power.
• Use cases (that is, proof points) are important to IT personnel. They like to look at what-if scenarios vis-à-vis their energy-saving policies. For example, when X number of PCs shut down or go to sleep at night, the company will save Y amount of money.

In the next section we describe the capabilities of Intel® vPro™ technology that help address the factors that influence the energy-consumption policies of IT organizations.

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