A lot of press has been given to green computing lately, much of it talking about green data centers. While you may applaud the fact that Dell, Google, HP and others are putting plans into action to reduce energy consumption, you may have a lot of trouble identifying with the whole ‘data center’ discussion. In fact, 40 percent of carbon emissions that are contributed to our atmosphere by technology products are contributed by client systems – desktops, laptops and printers – as opposed to 23 percent contributed by systems housed in data centers.

Studies done by Gartner suggest that the IT and communications technologies account for 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, which is on a par with the aviation industry. It is estimated that the CO2 emissions from just 10 PCs is equivalent to the emissions of an average car in the US.
Unfortunately, the rapid rate at which technology changes has been a huge factor in contributing to its environmental impact. With computers becoming ever faster and cheaper, many of us are getting new systems every 3 years, sending that old one off to the landfill.

While there is a growing trend towards environmentally friendly design and manufacturing, this is a relatively new development. If you are in the market for a new PC, and you want to minimize the impact of your decision, you will want to look for models that have earned EPEAT certification. EPEAT is a program of the Green Electronics Council that evaluates electronic products in relation to 51 total environmental criteria, 23 of which are required for a manufacturer to earn bronze designation. Additional criteria must be met to reach silver or gold certification. Systems that achieve these designations must not only be energy efficient, but must also eliminate or reduce environmentally sensitive materials, use recycled and/or recyclable materials, and significant attention must be paid to end of life issues, warranty and upgradability. Consideration is also given to corporate performance on various green initiatives. You can determine what models from different manufacturers have earned EPEAT certification at www.EPEAT.net.

While smaller system builders are not likely to earn this designation, they can build systems using 80 Plus power supplies. These power supplies are at least 80% efficient at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load. While these power supplies will add about $25 to the cost of your system, power requirements can be cut by as much as 20%.

You may also want to consider replacing desktops with notebooks which produce 5 times less greenhouse gases over a five year period. If you are still using a CRT type monitor, consider that a new LCD display can reduce carbon emissions by 15% over 5 years. And over the next year, look for new LED displays, which can use as much as 57% less energy as compared to current LCD monitors, to be introduced and become more affordable.

You may have had a tendency in the past to purchase a desktop or laptop that was capable of doing everything you need today and perhaps just a bit more. This keeps your spending at the lower end of the current price range, but it also means that your system will be less than adequate in fewer years. If spending just a bit more will allow you to use the equipment for an additional year, it may well be money well spent.

When replacing your systems, don’t forget to dispose of your old systems responsibly. If you systems still have useful life, look for an organization that can put your old system to good use or find an organization that can facilitate such a donation. TechSoup has tips for donating a computer at www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/hardware/page5496.cfm, along with a list of organizations that are authorized Microsoft refurbishers. Goodwill has partnered with Dell to accept used equipment to be refurbished or recycled. The National Cristina Foundation, www.cristina.org, is an organization that matches used equipment with needy schools and nonprofit organizations around the world. A simple Google search for “donate computer” will provide 456,000 results, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a good home for your used equipment. To take advantage of these opportunities, it is helpful to have the documentation and CDs that came with your system.

If you lease systems, be sure that you ask about how your systems will be handled at the end of the lease. Some leasing companies are definitely more green than others and if this is an issue that is important to you, it needs to be a consideration when you select a leasing company.

Don’t misunderstand, there is also a great deal that you can do with the technology you already own and this may well be the most responsible decision. While leaving your computer on 24 hours a day does make it possible to install security updates and perform maintenance while you are at home with your family or out with friends, implementing a policy where systems are powered off when not in use can save a third of the energy used to run a PC, as much at $20 to $60 annually per PC. If you don’t want to wait for your system to boot back up when you return, your system can be set to go into sleep or hibernate modes for faster access when you arrive back in the office. Larger organizations may want to consider ways to enforce these settings on a network wide level to insure that policies are being followed.

If you are working with a technology company that performs maintenance during off hours, ask if they can perform the maintenance tasks and then turn the machines off or put them into sleep or hibernate. While none of us want to have staff that is waiting for security updates or disks defrags to run, and we certainly don’t want to be wasting time waiting either, many of us would still like to be environmentally responsible.

Donald Case is CEO and co-owner of BizCare, Inc. in Lafayette, California. In business since 2006, BizCare delivers business enablement and IT services to the Health Care and Retail industries. Combining the latest in remote technologies together with its professional IT talent, more business leaders turn to BizCare for access to a broad range of flexible world-class IT services. Donald may be reached at sales@BizCare.com

The full-time corporate office where everyone is in the same building all day, every day, is clearly a thing of the past. IT Service Providers are fully engaged with supporting mobile work and, in many respects, is leading the way in helping the organization to increase productivity, enable more effective customer support, attract and retain talent and increase corporate agility. IT is not a barrier to making mobile work programs effective. While there may be many technical issues involved in supporting mobile work, the fact is, in general, IT Service Providers are doing their job so well they make it appear easy. However, ensuring data and network security – as well as reliability and access – remain in the top priority list. Mobile work is a powerful means of enhancing corporate competitiveness. Business Leaders who are not actively supporting mobile work arrangements are putting their organizations at serious risk. So what should you do to ensure that you are providing world-class support to your organization’s flexible work programs?

First, there is no question that supporting work wherever and whenever it occurs is a prime requirement for the modern office. Be sure that your HR and Facilities flexible work programs include policies supporting mobile workers. You don’t have to let security and connectivity standards be compromised. The one thing that keeps effective Business Leaders awake at night is the fear of compromised data. The good news is that Security As A Service (Saas) Providers are maintaining security while enabling mobile workers.

Second, focus IT support for mobility on enhancing customer service capabilities. We believe this perspective is essential because mobility options provide an efficient direct path from customer to employee. While general employee productivity is also important, it usually takes care of itself as mobile workers learn to use technology effectively and adapt it to their personal needs.

Finally, remember that providing remote access to data and company servers is just as important to your mobile workforce as having a laptop and a cell phone. And it has almost as powerful an impact on productivity. The full-time corporate office worker has almost become an exception to the general “rule” of working anytime/anyplace. Technology today enables flexible work, and an increasing proportion of the “new professionals” are moving around frequently, accessing the Internet, their colleagues and company files from wherever they happen to be at any point in time. Like a cell phone number, an Internet email address connects you to a person, not a place.

That new reality is only happening, however, because IT has bought into the concept, is actively supporting it and is implementing the platforms, networks and infrastructures to make it real.

It seems that even the most innocuous machines in the workplace can serve as a security threat to companies. According to this report from CBS News, many office copiers save the images they copy on a dedicated hard disk installed inside them. This means that everything from mundane memos to your most sensitive information such as financial statements and contracts are stored – and could potentially extracted.

So the next time you dispose of a copy machine, if you’re not sure what’s stored on it and how to get it off – give us a call to help out.

To see the news report, watch this video.

We couldn’t agree more with this reprint of a recent TechNewsDaily report

The success of Apple’s iPad has made consumers keen for tablet computers in general, and worldwide shipments of these devices will jump six times by 2014, according to recent analyst reports.

In a survey of nearly 13,000 consumers in 14 countries, 51 percent familiar with e-readers or tablet computers said they planned to purchase one within a year, while 73 percent said they planned to buy such a product within three years.

“The survey suggests that e-readers and tablets are not a niche product for early adopters but could become the MP3 players of this decade. Grandmothers will soon be carrying them around,” said John Rose of The Boston Consulting Group, which conducted the survey, in a statement.

The survey’s findings jibe with IDC’s prediction that shipments of portable personal computers will spike from 7.6 million this year to 46 million by 2014.

The market will grow as many other major computer and technology companies, including Dell, Sony, Samsung, and Google, have expressed interest in coming out with their own tablet computers in the near future.

However, two big players in this field – HP and Microsoft – recently shelved their post-iPad bids for a share of the tablet marketplace.

Dollars down, sales up

Apple, for its part, sold one million iPads just in the first month of its release through early May.

Key to tablets such as the iPad continuing to go gangbusters will be an anticipated drop in their retail price. The iPad presently goes for $499 on up to $829 for the deluxe version with the most memory capacity and 3G wireless service.

“As with other major mass market consumer devices the prices will come down,” Rose told AFP. “They always do . . . I expect you’ll see the prices come down in the next 12 to 18 months. The first iPod was a $400 device so there’s no reason why we won’t see the same cycle.”

This may be the year when “Cloud Computing” takes off – fueled by millions of intelligent and light weight mobile devices, securely interacting with others over a ubiquitous and always-on network.

At the moment, a much more profound change is taking place – where knowledge, formerly stored in document silos, is now shared, revised and published by designated trusted communities connected to the internet.

The document model, dominating the end of the last century has since been subsumed by a collaborative web-centric model.

The document model focused on individual contributors, maintaining content silos on individual or clustered PCs, loaded with software that empowered personal productivity offline and online. Internet connections were unreliable and security was assured through isolated information.

Collaboration meant creating a document, published to (hopefully all) affected stakeholders, who in turn would review, revise and return the changes back to those who could be trusted to meaningfully aggregate the consensus of the group. Multiple versions were maintained, with revisions languishing on file and print servers, and email in-boxes clogged up with revisions of the same document.

Work-flow solutions, often complex and difficult to use, became popular. Document change tracking was offered as a standard feature. Content management solutions were also deployed to store document revisions, with ad-hoc instant messenger networks filling in the collaboration gaps over the internet.

The collaborative web-centric model is different. Starting on the internet, knowledge starts with shared multi-user conversations with the presumption that all content will be shared instantly.

Designated stakeholders join and leave conversations dynamically, revising consensus knowledge simultaneously. All revisions are tracked and rolled back seamlessly. At any point along the way, the content can transform into documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, or even data-marts, which can be emailed or embedded, published to designated trust communities. Presentations are instantly shared for revision and play-back. Many-to-many conversations occur simultaneously over disparate communication channels. Storage no longer impedes communications – quotas are huge and growing.

The old model is still in play, but at an additional cost – namely license fees and more often than not, the required help of internal IT staff required to maintain these complex add-ons. The old model actually benefits those IT communities that support large organizations, creating jobs and meaningful roles in companies.

Smaller organizations are transitioning straight to cloud solutions by the thousands – embracing, for example, Google Apps, 37 Signals, and Salesforce.com solutions – which are much simpler to use and much more configurable. The transition is empowering ordinary knowledge workers to create sophisticated solutions without the intervention of IT experts.

The new work model, together with the exponential rise in intelligent and light weight mobile devices, appear to be driving this inflection point where powerful “enterprise” functionality is just now becoming available to smaller organizations a attractive cost efficiencies.

In our view this new work model yields a primary benefit in any Cloud Computing justification. Moving an old model into someone’s data center misses that benefit. Changing how stakeholders collaborate yields the greatest return on the lowest total ongoing cost of operating these new technologies.

A well thought out Datamation article entitled, “Top Five Thin Client Hardware Vendors“,  by Jeff Vance, resonates with our thinking, more specifically in the last paragraph of the last page, “Finally, while Apple has never claimed to be a thin client vendor, the iPad could well be the pioneering thin client for consumers. Sure, there’s more onboard horsepower than you’d normally associate with a thin client, but perhaps the iPad points the way to a computing category that’s not quite thin, not that fat, way too expensive, but popular nonetheless.” We couldn’t agree more.

As CEOs begin to spend again on IT, they’re also looking for offerings to keep their costs down, which is creating opportunities for desktop virtualization vendors, according to analysts.

We think the timing for this important release couldn’t be better. Read more about it in eWeek here…

Zero-client vendor, Pano Logic’s product is offering tighter integration with VMware’s View desktop virtualization platform as well as support for Microsoft’s Windows 7 in Pano System 3.0.

Pano Logic is releasing the latest version of its zero-client desktop virtualization offering, offering tighter integration with VMware’s View and support for Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.

Pano System 3.0, released April 14, also offers other new features as well, including the ability for users to reboot their virtual machines, or to lock their desktop and access a new one if a problem arises. This way, the user can continue working while enabling the IT department to examine the one with the problem.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about “going green” – helping preserve the environment, conserving energy, and looking for sustainable ways to grow the economy. The IT industry is doing its part as well, with “green computing,” which is basically computing by more efficient and sustainable means. You can get on board with some of the suggestions below:

1. Save on energy, save on costs:A lot of today’s computing devices feature power management features and energy saving modes, thanks largely to US government efforts to develop energy-efficiency standards called Energy Star. This is a voluntary labeling program adopted by many vendors to clearly identify and promote their efforts in bringing down energy costs for customers as well as to showcase their own use of eco-friendly production processes and materials. When you purchase Energy Star products and make full use of their features, you not only help the environment but also save significantly on your energy bills.
2. Reuse and Recycle:Consider retiring old equipment and replacing it with more energy-efficient models. Reuse what you can (such as RAM modules, cables, controller cards, and drives), and find a reputable recycler to help you dispose of remaining parts safely.
3. Consolidate what you have:Be eco-smart about your purchases. Advances in technology such as machine virtualization now allow you to consolidate computing resources on fewer machines, such as all-in-one printers, saving not only upfront capital costs but also recurring operating expenses such as maintenance, space, power, and cooling. Over time this means less equipment goes into landfills, better utilization of resources, and more money freed up to apply where it counts – to growing your business.
4. Do more with less:Instead of travelling, consider teleconferencing. Instead of hiring full time, onsite employees consider telecommuting arrangements. Not only do you reduce your carbon footprint by reducing transportation impact but also save a considerable amount of time and money as well.
5. Outsource IT:For non-core elements of your operations, consider outsourcing, which leverages economies of scale by sharing resources among several customers without losing efficiency or effectiveness. For example, instead of hosting your own website, outsource it to a hosting service provider instead.

We have lots of ideas for going green at your office and saving energy costs along the way. Give us a call and we’ll be glad to share them with you.

Further fueling the interest in zero-client solutions is the escalating costs of deploying and managing PCs, now estimated to be in the range of $4,000 to $6,000 per year, according to Gartner and IDC. Those same research companies estimate that a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) can save upwards of 70 percent over the support and maintenance costs of desktop PCs. Those are numbers that are sure to attract the attention of C-suite executives.

It doesn’t matter if you call it PC-over-IP, zero footprint PC, zero-client computing or just plain dumb terminal computing, the computing endpoint is undergoing a major change. Virtual desktop infrastructure from Wyse Technology, Pano Logic and Teradici may soon eliminate conventional PCs.

Read more about replacing desktop pc’s with zero client solutions here…