We have covered
SOA’s role in green IT before on this blog, (see Making IT More Green and Saving Money at the Same Time Through SOA). Loraine
Lawson provides an useful addition to the conversation with her
post, SOA's Green
ROI.
Lorraine sets the stage with
the fact that today, over 70 percent of the SOA adoption rationale is business
driven, versus only 30 percent in 2006. She adds that technology may never again
be the driving force in the corporate decision process, but in SOA, it will
always be the implementation mechanism. We have written that with SOA and many
other tech efforts, going green and getting a better ROI are interconnected.
Lorraine goes on to cover the opinion of Deborah Grove, a green
IT specialist, who has long been of the opinion that SOA is key to the
long-term definition of Green IT. “Right now, we are picking up the 'low
hanging fruit' by addressing the PUE (power usage effectiveness) of data
centers’ power consumption. However, looking at the entire IT food chain,
ensuring that ecosystems of suppliers, partners, and customers are moving to an
online collaborative style with less paper and less independent development of
customized applications through the use of SOA means that fewer hardware pieces
will be needed for dev and app servers.”
I certainly agree and automated testing and virtualization can
play a significant role in reducing waste from the IT food chain. Lorraine points out that Verizon
Wireless used SOA to green its IT infrastructure, reducing its hardware
footprint by 95 percent. The company measured its ROI by reduced tonnage of
hardware in the data center. However, the green of virtualization is not
limited to hardware, as we have discussed here (see
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