Feb 24 2009
A nearly unanimous 99 percent of IT professionals feel that it is important for their digital media and entertainment industry-related businesses to reduce their carbon footprint, and most are becoming much more aware of ecological issues due to recent press, celebrity involvement, and consumer demand. Despite these pressures, 76 percent give the industry average or poor grades in their progress towards embracing so-called Think Eco-Logical processes and practices.
These are among the many findings in an executive report: “Think Eco-Logical – IT Sustainability Imperatives in Digital Media & Entertainment Business” by The BPM Forum and its Global Renewable Energy and Environmental Network (GREEN) in conjunction with Rackable Systems (NASDAQ: RACK) and Intel, around a comprehensive online survey and executive dialogs including insights from over 100 IT professionals. The new report is part of a Think Eco-Logical initiative to educate companies on the need to address both the environmental side (Eco) of IT sustainability imperatives and the economics (Logical) of achieving environmental efficiencies in the data center.
According to a UCLA study, California’s film industry is the state’s second largest polluter, with only the oil industry having a greater negative impact on the environment. However, according to the BPM Forum study, more than 53 percent of companies don’t have or don’t know if they have a corporate sustainability agenda in place. And lack of awareness of business benefits was identified as the top challenge to environmental sustainability.
The report shows some positive signs as IT executives become more actively aware and engaged in ecological issues:
- 88 percent say it’s important to have Eco-Logical servers
- 90 percent have begun to implement Think Eco-Logical activities to some extent in
their organization
- Top potential benefits of ecological practices are reduced power/cooling costs (79 percent), social responsibility (73 percent), and positive PR (62 percent)
- 80 percent say the digital media & entertainment industry is more sensitized towards the move to Thinking Eco-Logical than they were a year ago
The data shows, however, that while the digital media industry understands the benefits, there are significant perceived obstacles in adopting Think Eco-logical practices, such as an unwillingness to compromise technology productivity (60 percent), costs of efficiencies (58 percent) and lack of awareness of benefits (50 percent).
“Media businesses are facing huge increases in IT infrastructure and storage capacity requirements as entertainment and distribution go increasingly digital,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the BPM Forum. “Public and industry peer pressure to act ecologically is mounting in parallel, and it’s time that these companies take swift action with green practices not only to maintain a positive image, but to drive improvements to their bottom line.”
With huge production facilities and distribution networks pushing massive amounts of data – downloads, streaming video, renderings, animation, etc. – digital media & entertainment companies stand to gain huge benefits from ecological improvements to IT infrastructure. Coughlin Associates, a data storage consulting group, predicts a 10X increase in required digital storage capacity and over 8X growth in storage capacity shipments per year by 2012 in the digital media & entertainment industry.
“We are encouraged that the awareness levels are higher to make change in greening the data center within digital media,” said George Skaff, vice president of marketing at Rackable Systems. “We think that there are real efficiency benefits that can be achieved by these companies in the short term to overcome their perceived obstacles and to achieve the desired environmental, social, and economic benefits.”
“The Think Eco-Logical campaign promotes real world business benefits and environmental sustainability,” said Lorie Wigle, General Manager Intel® Eco-Technology. "Rackable Systems, Intel and others in the industry are developing energy-efficient, high-performance solutions that will help companies reach Think Eco-Logical goals.”
The “Think Eco-Logical – IT Sustainability Imperatives in Digital Media & Entertainment Business” report is available for download at http://www.rackable.com/thinkecological/media-ent-report-download.html.