Green IT to save HP 'billions'

HP has a new spin on the classic Gordon Gekko line: “Green is good.”

The technology company said this week that its three-year IT transformation has not only saved it more than $1 billion a year since 2005 but has significantly boosted efficiency while lowering energy consumption.

While the transformation’s main goals were to achieve maximum effectiveness and next-generation technology, the strategy has also succeeded in making HP more green. HP chairman and CEO Mark Hurd said the key was finding ways to save money that could then be spent on other business improvements.

“With a lower IT cost structure we are able to reinvest dollars into go-to-market efforts,” Hurd said. “This challenge isn’t unique to HP. Most companies have the opportunity to create an IT cost structure that is at least half of today’s average for their industry. We can, and do, share our experiences with our customers.”

HP’s transformation strategy is helping the company to:

• Reduce internal IT costs from 4 percent of revenues to less than 2 percent;
• Cut data center energy consumption by 60 percent;
• Reduce its number of servers by 40 percent while boosting processing power by 250 percent;
• Lower the number of applications used to run the business from 6,000-plus to about 1,500, and
• Consolidate more than 85 internal data centers into six next-generation centers with ample room for expansion.

So the next time someone tells you that green IT efforts are too costly when the economy is sour, point to HP as living proof to the contrary.