Nick Milne Home, President of 1E, discusses why Japanese companies are now seeing GreenIT strategies as a cost effective way to lower energy costs and increase their sustainability efforts.

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Ben Lack: I want to talk to you a little bit about your solution. Your company has a really interesting IT efficiency software solution that you offer commercial and industrial clients and us being The Daily Energy Report, your solution really taps into this whole idea of green IT which is a global issue. You’ve recently been to Japan and looked at some of the obstacles that Japan is facing right now and I wanted to see if you could share with us some of your insight about what you observed.
Nick Milne-Home: Fantastic, absolutely. I’ve just returned from Tokyo and as you know, Japan’s government has imposed over this summer a 15% reduction on energy usage across vast swathes of the country. Particularly the greater Tokyo region, owing to the energy crisis following last year’s earthquake and tsunami. I really felt that 1E’s energy reduction software solutions could genuinely help Japanese companies, not least because 70% of the data centers are in the greater Tokyo region. Now, one of the key findings out there was that actually very few Japanese organizations are actually looking towards any green IT solutions at all as part of their energy reduction strategies and that really surprised me. It seems that they’re doing all the really hard things like turning off air conditioning, having their offices at 85o, no one’s wearing ties, everyone’s hot, they’re doing weekend working, they are taking out light bulbs and yet, there are some very simple steps that can be taken to actually lower energy usage just using IT.
Ben Lack: So, talk to me a little bit about why you think this green IT solution has been overlooked by the Japanese companies.
Nick Milne-Home: If you take what 1E has done in both the US and Europe, on the PC side we found in a survey we did in 2009, up to 50% of corporate PC’s in the US were not being turned off at night or at weekends. So, using simple PC power management software such as 1E’s NightWatchman, you could save $2.8 billion in avoidable costs and 20 million tons of CO2 per year just by implementing solutions over and above what is possible through standard Window’s policy settings and so on. We’ve had fantastic customer success with this, organisations such as Dell, who lowered their IT energy usage 40% and a saving $1.8 million per year. Verizon Wireless saving $1.3 million per year and Ford saving $1.2 million per year. So, given these savings, we really feel we can help Japanese companies as well achieve similar levels.
Ben Lack: So it sounds like the issue is really that they don’t know this messaging and so the sea level folks or the decision makers don’t have this as one of the projects they could potentially implement to save money.
Nick Milne-Home: Exactly, that’s the point and actually we’re finding that here as well. We did a U.S. server energy report last year. One of the key findings of that was that 72% of data center managers in the US felt that up to 15% of their servers, that’s 1 in 6 servers in their data centers were doing no useful work. That is no longer running the applications for which they were originally commissioned. Now, their challenge is they simply did not know which ones. Last year 1E launched NightWatchman Server to specifically address this issue. If 1 in 6 of the servers in Japanese data centers is doing no useful work, which is 15%, we can actually achieve not a tactical benefit for Japanese organizations. We can actually achieve strategic benefits. This is true elsewhere again. By just having 1 in 6 servers being unproductive in a typical data center, the cost is $25 billion per year of entirely avoidable costs or 20 million tons of carbon. Over 5 years that is over $125 billion of entirely avoidable costs.
Ben Lack: Which is quite the game-changer in the great scheme of things. So, there are a lot of similarities between the Japanese IT community and the IT communities around the world. Give me some points on what you saw that’s unique to the IT discussion within Japan and why this implementation hasn’t happened as fast as it could.
Nick Milne-Home: I think the first area is just one of culture. I think that the Japanese focus is on precision engineering and actually, I think that given that there is not a focus on whether IT is or is not efficient, that what we’re finding therefore is that there is a belief that IT is. I think secondly, what we’re finding is that the Japanese IT industry is run by 2 or 3 very sizeable Japanese technology companies, people like NTT, Hitachi, Fujitsu and so on, and they again haven’t necessarily been targeted by organizations such as ourselves to actually tell them what solutions are now out there. So again, just to give you one clear example, Parker Hannifin who is a leading US engineering company based out of Ohio, identified and removed 458 unnecessary servers last year. Now, there are hundreds if not thousands of Parker Hannifins in Japan. The point is we simply haven’t yet got the message out to them or to the Japanese IT companies.
Ben Lack: When you create this road map for any client, Japanese or otherwise, what are some of the strategies that you bring to them and say this is what you need to be looking at on a grand scheme of things and this is how we are going to help you execute?
Nick Milne-Home: What we tell them at a very high level is to ensure that IT efficiency and green IT forms part of your sustainability plan. That is key, it’s the greening of the technology across the organization that will create the greatest economic and sustainability benefits. So, working with leading organizations, typically what we will do is to get them to follow 3 very simple steps. It’s to implement PC power management, which I mentioned already. Secondly, is to implement server consolidation which is to identify the 1 in 6 servers not doing any useful work and thirdly, is to identify any unnecessary software.Last year, we also issued a server license report in the US, which found perhaps unsurprisingly, given that shelf ware is an excepted industry term, that up to $414 worth of unused software is sitting on every PC or laptop of every organization in the US and that is a staggering figure. So again, using solutions such as 1E’s AppClarity, you can identify, reclaim and remove that unnecessary waste. The savings again, extrapolated out over the US, run to some $12.6 billion per year. So, these 3 areas combined, PC power management, server consolidation to identify unproductive servers and license removal can save $200 billion if not $300 billion across the world and these again are strategic impacts.
Ben Lack: The product that you guys are most known for that’s kind of your knight in shining armor is The NightWatchman. Talk to us a little bit about what some of the new features are now that you have a recent release of a new addition.
Nick Milne-Home: We have recently released NightWatchman 6 and essentially what this does is to take it down to an even more granular level of detail. It means we can actually apply power policies down to departments, down to buildings, down to individuals if we need to and through that you can really fine tune what your power settings are and maximize savings. We are delighted to say that we have recently calculated that we have saved our customers over $550 million of avoidable energy costs over the last 5 years and we have saved 4.3 million tons of carbon entering the Earth’s atmosphere and that is our customer’s data rather than ours.
Ben Lack: So, talk to me just very briefly about what’s next for 1E as you guys close out the fourth quarter?
Nick Milne-Home: Well, we’ve got some very exciting deals which we’re working on with some leading fortune 500 companies. I can’t reveal who those are right now, but we have got our new software license product AppClarity, which is going from strength to strength. We’ve just released NightWatchman 1.5 which is energy wise compliant working with Cisco and we are looking out into the greater IT efficiency world of next year.
Ben lack: Why have you decided to work in this space and personally, why are you doing what you’re doing?
Nick Milne-Home: It’s very simple. We’ve got one life and I’ve always been passionate about IT and I’ve always been passionate about sustainability and technology is the key to sustainability. So, ensuring that we are really efficient in how we use and operate our technology so we will actually ensure that we can drive towards a cleaner and more sustainable planet and I live and breathe by that.


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