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Mitel (and Others) Go Green

July 12, 2007

By Blair Pleasant

This article appeared in VoIPloop.com

 

As I sit here watching the Live Earth concert, aimed at promoting awareness about global warming, I’ve been thinking not only about what I can do to help protect the planet, but what others are doing as well. Fortunately, many technology companies are making moves to “go green”. I was at the Mitel Analyst conference in Las Vegas recently (although Las Vegas is the complete opposite of environmentally friendly), where I heard CEO Don Smith describe what Mitel is doing to help protect the environment. During Don’s Strategic and Business Update to the analysts, he repeated the theme that “Mitel is Different”, and presented a slide stating that “Different is Innovative and Green” – this caught my attention.

 

Don discussed what Mitel is doing internally as a company to reduce CO2 emissions, and how its products can be used to help other companies go green. A slide titled “Green - Good for the Bottom Line & the Environment” pointed out that “If 10% of the US workforce telecommute just 1 day/week, Americans would conserve more than 1.2 million gallons of fuel per week.” Don noted that Mitel’s products that make it easier for workers to telecommute and have remote meetings, including Mitel’s Contact Center Solutions for virtual contact centers enabling agents to work from home, as well as telecommuting solutions such as Mitel Teleworker and Your Assistant, offering video/audio conferencing, plus web collaboration. This is all well and good, but lots of other companies offer solutions for telecommuting and conferencing.

What really impressed me was the announcement that Sun and Mitel are working together to simplify and reduce the hardware used by workers by offering a joint solution that eliminates the need for servers for each individual worker and greatly reducing the amount of energy used.

 

The new Sun Ray IP Phone Bundle solution allows for a single hot desk sign-on for both the Sun Ray ultra-thin client terminal and the Mitel IP phone, so that workers need only a keyboard and flat screen monitor that connect to the back of the Mitel stand with the Sun Ray ultra thin terminal. Multiple users work off of the same Sun Ray server, eliminating the need for individual servers and hard drives for each worker. According to the press release, “The Mitel stand, portable to any Mitel set, has a Java Card technology slot to allow for Sun Ray and Mitel IP phone hot desking. This small footprint device delivers all of the traditional Sun Ray features with lower power consumption than a separate phone and thin client.”  Users take their Java card, put it in the base of the station, and can hot desk into the Mitel phone set and the Sun Ray at the same time.

 

What, you may ask yourself, is the big deal.  Huge energy savings. The Sun Ray uses only 4 watts, while a typical PC uses 80 watts, and the Mitel IP Phone uses 3.3 watts compared with competitors’ phones using 8 watts. Mitel notes that companies can save 80 watts per user, and for 100 users, that equals 16,000 kilowatt hours or 18 tons of CO2 emissions. Instead of having racks and stacks of hardware in a room generating power, putting the call control on a single server helps to greatly save energy.

 

Smith also identified other ways in which Mitel is going green, including applying green building principles to lower energy consumption, and becoming a “Green Partner,” by conforming to environment designs and standards, including Energy Star compliance.

 

Mitel and Sun aren’t the only companies going green. Other companies, such as IBM, are also doing their part for the environment, focusing on server consolidation and virtualization. For example, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and IBM teamed up to deploy a server consolidation and virtualization initiative with the explicit goal of reducing energy consumption in PG&E’s data center facilities in San Francisco, Fairfield and Diablo Canyon, California. According to a press release, “PG&E will consolidate nearly 300 Unix servers onto 6 IBM System p servers, helping to reduce 80 percent of its energy and facilities consumption, and will use IBM virtualization technologies to boost utilization of the systems from 10 percent capacity to over 80 percent. In addition, PG&E will deploy IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger water cooling technology on the System p servers to reduce heat in the data center by up to 60 percent.”

 

And just the other day I received an email about a new two-day event called the Green Technology World Conference, “focusing on the use of modern technologies to help businesses minimize environmentally unfriendly business practices. The Green Technology World Conference will educate attendees about technologies, essential issues, and trends that enable companies to operate more efficiently, thereby creating a positive impact on both their businesses and the environment.”

 

I’m trying to do my part – I work at home and carpool the kids to school. What’s YOUR company doing to help go green?