John Grey, chair of HP's Environmental Strategy Council, addressed the company's environmental programs and goals at a recent roundtable. Grey discussed their promise to reduce energy consumption, and the impact that HP's video collaboration tool, Halo, has had on the "green" movement.
The following are excerpts from the meeting:
Q: How realistic is HP's promise to reduce energy consumption by 20 per cent in 2011?
John Grey: I think it's very realistic. It also includes as part of that 20 per cent, a pretty strong stretch by us pushing back to the power suppliers, for more efficient power supplies and driving customer demand for that. Because it's not enough to just develop a product and put it on the market. If nobody will buy it, that's a whole different problem.
And that's one of the challenges we face in the consumer space quite frankly. Consumers are very price conscious and they don't know how to fare it through environmental claims well, to actually see where their going to get a return on investment.
We've found that over 15 years of doing product energy efficiency is that we're confident we can make it. In fact, in this 20 per cent case we're actually having the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) use an independent consultant to measure our progress around the goal. So it's not even how HP says we're doing on the goal, it's that independent party measuring us along the goal.
Q: While you hear many customers saying that environmental concerns are important, a lot of them don't back it up with action. So, what is HP doing to change that?
JG: I'll characterize customers that come to us in about three camps. You have those who are really interested in this and they come to HP saying, "we want to do business with you and we want to benchmark and learn with you." And so we do that, I spent a lot of time working with our customers.
There's another group that says, "we want to do well at this," but it's very clear to see that part of their motivation is shifting attention from some other place that's getting a lot of external fire and they think that if they are strong in environment or strong in sustainability, it will help shift focus and attention. We work with them as well.
The third group is "we want to say we're doing the right things and, by the way HP, we want to take credit for what you're doing." And if they're an HP customer, that's OK too.
I'm less concerned about what their motivation is and part of the conversations I have with CEOs are "hey look, if all you care about is total cost of ownership, these things we've been doing around energy efficiency and recycling are absolutely the right thing. And by the way, you get the environmental benefit for free."
Q: Since September 11th, there has been a big push within HP on business continuity and contingency planning that led a few organizations to duplicate your data centres. How do you reconcile that trend, with the trend to take your data centres down, so are you still seeing a push on the disaster recovery?
JG: I think the answer is that, companies are still looking for redundancy. There's still an increased call for hot sites, and in fact one of the side values from an environmental perspective, that we've noticed, is back to asset recovery services.
I come from the Compaq linage, and Compaq acquired Digital Equipment (DEC) many years ago. Lots of governments are still running old DEC gear. So when they want to build a hot site, DEC gear hasn't been made in over 10 years. So, where does their redundant equipment come from? It comes from HP asset recovery after we take back DEC gear from another customer. We don't shred it up or try to sell the assets. We recondition it and put it on the shelf. So when a customer says, "I need an old Vax 1000, anyway you guys can help me find one," we are able to help them. We even keep competitors gear for the same reason, because we try and give customers what they want.
Continued: The impact of Halo on the green movement
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