Cisco Learning Network Green IT Pages

Cisco Systems is emerging as one of the leaders in green IT among the big high-tech companies. They’re leading a project in cooperation with the cities of Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Seoul Korea in a project called the Connected Urban Development.

This is in an effort to identify the ways that cities are improving their basic infrastructures to dramatically decrease carbon emissions in areas like mass transit, telecommuting, smart electrical grids, and other ways to fuse information technology with work and lifestyle that decrease our energy usage.

Cisco has also launched their Green IT Pages as a part of their Cisco Learning Network (they highlight TechSoup in an article on their main page too!). This learning network provides Cisco customers, partners, and Cisco employees the opportunity to collaborate and share knowledge, training, mentoring, and support as they develop their careers through Cisco certifications.

Their new green pages have a short statement by Cisco's courtly green guru and vice president of engineering, Paul Marcoux called “Cisco's new collaboration tools key to green strategy”. In it, Marcoux explains the company’s work in the field of telepresence and unified communications.

Unified communications applications reduce work commuting and increase the quality of business communications and their reliance on ubiquitous telephone conference calls. Cisco’s suite of unified communications applications all work using internet protocols to integrate messaging, voice, video, and web conferencing. TelePresence is basically enhanced Internet-based video conferencing that can reduce the need for long-distance travel.

Paul Marcoux is a founding member of Green Grid, a vendor-led consortium that is developing metrics for measuring energy efficiency within IT ecosystems.

Marcoux says "If you can change your employees commuting habits or travel habits, you've really taken pretty big steps there," he said, "bigger steps probably than energy efficiency in your data center."