Who's the Greenest IT Company? The Answer Might Surprise You

Published April 20, 2009

From energy-management sensors to data center consolidation, and from green IT performance bonuses to cloud computing, the companies on Computerworld's Top 12 Green IT Organizations list are pointing the way forward in using IT to improve a company's environmental performance.

The magazine has once again pulled together the most innovative and effective companies, and the results once again fall far afield of what you'd expect a green IT company to look like.

Take the first-place winner: Mohawk Fine Papers based in upstate New York. After implementing as many IT-centric efficiency programs he could think of, the company's VP of information technology, Paul Stamas, looked beyond IT to find ways to apply computing power for the larger environmental goal.

The result is a project that put Mohawk at the top of the heap in this year's list. From the article:

Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, designed to optimize the efficiency of manufacturing plants and equipment. The company has also installed thousands of sensors that monitor everything from office lighting to smokestack emissions. It consolidates the data into several systems, including OSIsoft Inc.'s PI System, for analysis. [...] "These sensor models give you much more real-time information than we've ever had before," says Howard Rubin, CEO of Rubin Worldwide, which tracks global technology trends. "Through the sensor system, [Mohawk] has a massive ability to continuously optimize" for peak energy efficiency.

On a more traditional green IT front, the second- and third-place winners, State Street and Allstate, respectively, earned their spots on the list through ambitious consolidiation projects: State Street consolidated its Unix servers onto high-powered and energy-efficient Linux mainframes to save costs, while Allstate condensed four data centers into two virtualized data centers that use less than 25 percent of the energy of the older centers and save the company $65 million in construction and purchasing costs.

In addition to the top 12 green IT users (full list is below), Computerworld also ranked the top 12 vendors for green IT solutions: IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu-Siemens come out at the top of that list, which is also included below.

Top Green-IT Users