Hello, fans of Vendor Strategy. Welcome to Forrester's new-look VS blog. We will be aggregating analyst posts across our entire Vendor Strategy research team here, so bookmark it and please come back often.

Here's how my colleague Cliff Condon summarized Forrester's move to a new blog platform:

Hey everyone.  Here it is – Forrester’s new blog network. We made some changes to improve the experience for readers and to encourage more analysts to blog. Feel free to poke around and let me know what you think.

There are a few things I’d like to point out to you:
 

Were your hopes for growing adoption of green IT dashed by the non-agreement at COP 15 in Copenhagen? Are you dismayed by the weak prospects for cap-and-trade legislation in the US during 2010? Forrester's latest Green IT survey results give us some reason for optimism -- it turns out that regulatory compliance is a weak motivation for companies' pursuit of more sustainable computing operations.

When we asked IT practitioners at 600 enterprises around the world about their top motivations for pursuing green IT operations, regulatory compliance was the 7th-most frequently cited reason, with just 16% of respondents. What's at the top? Cost and cost. Reducing energy expenses (66%) and reducing other IT operating expenses (42%) have been the strongest drivers for green IT since we began our survey work on this topic in 2007. See the full survey results in our latest Green IT Market Overview report, here.

So fear not, even in the absence of significant regulatory or policy moves this year, good old-fashioned business motivators like profitability and customer demand will continue to push companies to adopt more sustainable processes and practices -- in their IT organization and beyond.

[Posted by Christopher Mines]

My colleague Doug Washburn and I did a Forrester Webinar yesterday for tech vendor clients & prospects. We closed with 6 takeaways for tech vendors seeking to capitalize on the mega-trend of sustainability adoption by their corporate customers:

1. Corporate sustainability is here to stay; green IT is not a fad or a fashion.

2. Energy efficiency is important for all IT assets, not just the data center.

3. Enterprises implementing green IT need process change and consulting support, not just new hardware and software.

4. Vendors must market their green solutions with a holistic vision and a tactical implementation path.

5. Green IT has many customer stakeholders, each with a different view of its priority and benefits. VEndors must be multi-lingual in developing conversations with these stakeholders.

6. Be clear about the cost-benefit arithmetic. Help customers build their business case with ROI numbers that are clear, simple, and complete.

[Posted by Christopher Mines]

I had the privilege of hosting the Green IT 2009 conference in London back in May and wanted to share a couple of observations about that terrific event. I often tell clients in the U.S. that I am taking "a trip to the future" when I go to Europe; in particular, UK public sector organizations are probably the most advanced anywhere in terms of green IT behaviors (or should I say behaviours?).

Two statements I heard from IT procurement people at the conference that should be on the radar screen for vendor strategists looking to anticipate the next wave of enterprises' green requirements, and for IT planners looking to get more aggressive about their company's green IT initiatives:

• Requirements for longer-lifecycle IT equipment. Planned obsolence is going to become obsolete. Expect your customers to require longer warranty periods, modular/upgradeable designs, and lifecycle-based carbon footprint analysis from you and your gear. Companies are realizing that, as one conference attendee put it, "we puts lots of bodies in motion" when they order new equipment.

• Increasing demand for green/renewable energy. No matter how efficient a data center is, it can't really be green unless it's powered by green energy.

[Posted by Christopher Mines]