According to a recent market study by Datamonitor, the current global economic recession may also prove to be a significant driver for Green Computing. Their market assessment raises lots of questions -- including, is it better for the world, and overall business profitability, if executives cut-back on their IT investments?

"The global economic recession has spurred a paradigm shift in the way organizations evaluate, budget for and deploy green IT," says Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Datamonitor. "The downturn has also resulted in green IT trends for datacenters, client devices and asset lifecycle management, as well as re-shaped return on investment (ROI) models."

Datamonitor believes green IT that's intended to eliminate the need for capital expenditure -- such as datacenter virtualization, facility design and asset lifecycle management -- has become very important, especially as IT budgets are trimmed.

Lean and Green in 2009
Their research uncovered that lean IT budgets will likely be the norm in 2009, and that organizations will predominately seek green IT solutions because they're cost-effective. This represents a significant market trend, in their opinion.

Green ROI models are becoming compulsory and shorter. In order for green IT vendors to satisfy these new ROI requirements, they're being forced to develop more efficient solutions. However, when it comes to new IT equipment investments, if "less" is more, then "none" can be even better.

Business technology budget constraints force CIOs and IT managers to think beyond legacy approaches to a current problem. As a result, organizations that face critical datacenter limitations are already considering alternatives to building new datacenters or upgrading existing facilities.

Alternatives to IT Capital Investment
Those alternatives include IT leasing, managed services, virtualization software, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Datamonitor believes datacenter resources will increasingly be hosted in a cloud-based environment, which should -- at least theoretically, they say -- fall under the green IT banner.

Clearly, it really doesn't matter what you call your own concerted plan to reduce and contain operating expenses -- in contrast, what matters most is that you take appropriate action now.

Perhaps you're still wondering if the selective out-tasking of business technology is something that your executive team should act upon. If so, you might consider also reading the recent editorial in a mainstream business magazine entitled "The IT Companies Shouldn't Buy" and then ask yourself some of the same fundamental questions about your own business strategy.

• Grid, Cloud and Green Computing