Corporate Green IT Awards from InfoWorld

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InfoWorld has released its annual Green 15 list, a badge of recognition for sustainability initiatives within the IT sector since 2008. This year’s winners have saved money, time and energy while in the process pushing innovation and user engagement. The list includes a school district, local governments, small businesses as well as corporate giants.

Some details about this year’s winners:

The Copernicus Group Independent Review Board (CGIRB) reviews biomedical research for the FDA and had to conquer a tower of paperwork - literally, a 22-foot-tall pillar of paper documents each week. Today, the company is 97 percent paperless after developing a homegrown document-management portal called Connexus.

Beginning with an outsourced project to scan, index, and archive some 5 million legacy documents and publish them to Xerox DocuShare, CGIRB then worked with Xerox and Sitrof to customize security settings on CFR-11 regulated documents. The organization saved more than $2 million on shipping, printing, postage, and file storage. Staffers can now digitally search through 5 million pages' worth of legacy documents and process client requests in 3.7 minutes on average instead of 104 minutes as had been the case in its paper-based era.

As part of a comprehensive IT overhaul, construction company Hovnanian launched a large-scale data center consolidation effort, though which Hovnanian IT virtualized its servers and storage, and employee desktops using Citrix HDX. The company also adopted power management software to power down PCs. Hovnanian adopted PolyCom videoconferencing, GoToMeeting for webinars, Microsoft Communicator for IM, and Oracle Contact Center Anywhere for remote desktop support, and developed its own e-training modules courses. Overall, Hovnanian is saving $300,000 on server costs, $80,000 per year on electricity, and $1.2 million on travel costs. Its carbon footprint is down by 775,000 pounds.

FedEx overhauled its enterprise data center to boost capacity from 50 watts per square foot to 125 watts per square foot through sustainable practices. The 140,000-square-foot facility is a candidate for LEED Gold certification, and overall the project achieved an energy cost saving of 12.8 percent. Inside, the data center houses two heat exchangers, reaping 7,100 hours of free cooling by circulating Colorado’s cool, dry outside air. On the IT side, the company worked to consolidate its server, storage, and network infrastructure, in part by revising applications to use the same database and messaging technology. All in all, FedEx squeezed the computing power of 4,000 servers into just 400 servers.

Green 15, the 2011 Winners:

Aetna

Autodesk

Boulder Valley School District

The Copernicus Group Independent Review Board

Fairfax County Government

FedEx

Fujitsu

GE Energy

HCL Technologies

Hovnanian

Intel

Tata Consultancy Services

Telenor Norway

West Virginia Office of Technology

Xiolin

See the full info on winners here.

Environment + Energy Leader