IT Has Facility Managers Seeing Green

According to Ephraim Schwartz of InfoWorld, companies can cut energy costs “if IT applies its technology know-how to managing facilities.”

Schwartz says that rising energy costs and new energy management systems are changing the interaction between traditional facility managers and IT managers into a more consultative relationship.

Collaboration between the two managers has increased. At the Datacenter Users' Group meeting, 62 percent of the 230 industry experts from Fortune 1000 companies said partnership between IT and facilities management has increased over the last 12 months.

Here are some of the benefits of IT and facilities management collaborating:

• Energy-saving virtualization technology reduces the number of servers needed, decreasing overall consumption.
• IT managers can offer experience required for the new energy environment in asset tracking. This allows businesses to track power consumption and usage patterns to figure out appropriate load balancing.
• By deploying analysis-based energy management systems, companies can lower costs for energy, decrease equipment maintenance costs, reduce carbon footprint, and increase effectiveness of the extended enterprise.

Here's a guide to energy management for facility managers.