Cisco’s not kidding
South African companies must use electricity cuts as a catalyst to implement environmentally IT systems and practices, says Cisco South Africa’s services head Mark Baptiste. He says while electricity shortages have definitely made SA companies more aware, most are only in the initial stages of planning to implement “greener” policies.
While the United States and Europe tended to lead with regard to issues such as this, SA had probably been thrust to the crest of the wave earlier than otherwise might have been the case. Baptiste says Cisco is concentrating on four areas: helping companies understand their day-to-day operational impact; developing products to help them reduce their environmental impact and improve efficiencies; changing the architectural view of solutions they can build for clients, such as the connected communities being built from the ground up in Saudi Arabia; and holding its own employees to account.
A key product for Cisco is its TelePresence, which enables executives to conduct live video conferencing worldwide. Implementing that would enable executives to cut the amount of flying and driving they do – making the return on investment relatively easy to demonstrate, says Baptiste.
However, in the SA context the continued lack of real and affordable broadband remains an obstacle to implementing the completely connected community, where employees can work from home as effectively as in the office.
Baptiste says it’s frustrating to watch the delay, particularly given the direct correlation between broadband and economic growth. “That will be the catalyst for many things.”
He also concedes there’s still a mindset in some companies of wanting to see people at work to establish that they were actually working. But that’s changing. In addition to the connected workplace, there were other ways a company could cut its electricity requirements, such as introducing greater efficiencies in its data centre using virtualization and using hardware that powered down when not in use.
Finweek
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