Are You A Green Managed Service Provider?
A recent survey by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) of hundreds of professionals reveals work station drainage poses a prevalent power consumption dilemma. Every day, workstations consume power for hours on end, devouring millions of dollars worth of energy. In addition, survey respondents report that 69% of them use more than one workstation and 24% stated that they keep their stations powered on around the clock. For every 10,000 workstations, more than $1.26 million in energy costs is wasted each year.
According to the survey, desktops are kept on during 43% of non-work hours, including evenings and weekends, to the tune of 55-plus hours a week. This adds an unnecessary $73 to the $150 in energy each desktop uses yearly. Systems management and automation software solutions, like Kaseya’s user state management, are able to proactively force system shutdowns when desktops are inactive, and intelligent chip sets, such as the Intel vPRO, can also force system shutdowns remotely. These solutions can also regulate power consumption during operational hours.
For the MSP, this means considerable opportunities to provide savings for their customers. Especially in today’s soft economy, customers will welcome something that saves money and helps the environment at the same time. Adding automated power management to an SLA can be an easy way to achieve savings while helping businesses go green.
Consider the following in your SLAs: the EPA recommends setting computers to enter system standby after 30 to 60 minutes and monitors to enter sleep mode after five to 20 minutes. In addition, reducing the number of workstations for each employee would not only decrease power costs, but hardware costs, application costs and maintenance costs as well. Converting to laptop use could also be beneficial, as the average annual cost for laptop power consumption is only around $23, which is 16% of the energy cost of a desktop. Deploying docking stations for laptops would eliminate redundant desktops.
To down load the EMA research on The True Value of Green IT visit: http://it.kaseya.com/solutions/green_computing.aspx.
Note: Dan Shapero is Senior Vice President, Marketing at Kaseya. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor.net’s Platinum sponsorship.
Dan:
I couldn’t agree more. There is plenty of opportunity here for MSP’s to show some technology leadership while promoting envrionmental stewardship. The great part of this is that it doesn’t cost the MSP or the customer money — it actually saves the customer money. What better “foot in the door” is there than showing a immediate cost savings?
This article outlines one product — there are many others out there that need to be explored. N-central with Remote Environment Manager from N-able Technologies (www.n-able.com) provides sophisticated power control capabilities including time of day based inactivity rules, as well as tools that will allow the MSP to power down systems remotely using Intel(r) vPro(tm) technologies. In addition, you can power them up automatically as part of an off hours maintenance program which improves power usage and MSP efficiency.
MSP’s have lots of options on how to best to use Green initatives in their operational as well as sales and marketing programs. The need to make sure the look beyond just the sponsored links.
An open note to readers: One of MSPmentor’s goals is to celebrate coopetition in the MSP market. Former Novell CEO Ray Noorda coined the phrase coopetition to describe companies that need to both cooperate and compete.
In recent weeks, for instance, you’ve seen Kaseya, N-able and Level Platforms all talk about green IT strategies on this site.
Some of the Kaseya and N-able perspectives are above (from Dan and Rob, respectively). And you can find the Level Platforms perspective here. Each vendor brings a unique strategy to the green movement. But they still find time to engage in debate/discussion with one another. Which is great.
For the managed services market to grow and thrive, we need more of this cross-company dialog.
When the PC market was growing up, Gates and Jobs put aside their differences long enough to share the stage for some major moments in IT history.
Similar moments are now occurring in the managed services industry. During the N-able conference last month in Dallas, it was great to see rivals like Autotask, ConnectWise and Tigerpaw on the same stage, describing the PSA (professional services automation) market.
We hope to see similar “moments” in MSP history occurring through vendor-driven organizations like MSP Partners and through MSP- and channel-focused associations like MSPAlliance and CompTIA.
And we hope to see the competitive — and cooperative — dialog continue here on MSPmentor.