IBM Moves into IT Sustainability Services

IBM has one of the oldest IT services organizations in the world. The firm stands out historically for looking at problems holistically instead of cherry-picking a few aspects of a particular problem.

One of the most difficult problems companies deal with is sustainability. You must balance the financial needs of the company with the increasing environmental protection requirements of customers, investors, and employees. If this gets out of balance, revenue, customer and investor loyalty, and the company’s image can be adversely affected. But unless the company is in the sustainability business, it lacks the skills and capabilities to do sustainability well.

As a result, a services organization that understands both the company’s needs for sustainability and the government regulations surrounding it is an ideal resource. IBM had to spin up internally a significant global capability for its own sustainability efforts, and much like Amazon did with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is an offshoot of its own IT shop, IBM took its global sustainability capability and government knowledge and turned it into a service.

Since IBM exists between cloud providers with its own IBM Cloud effort focused on only the most secure of deployments, it is also able to best advise on how to balance a client’s multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments so that they’re not only the most cost effective, but the most sustainable, as well.

Let’s talk about IBM’s Sustainability Strategy and Service this week.

IT Sustainability Optimization Assessment Service

It is interesting to note that back when IBM was the dominant IT vendor, it would manage the hardware it leased and effectively provide IT-as-a-service to its customers as a matter of course. Given IBM shops were entirely IBM hardware-based, and IBM still owned the hardware, this not only made a lot of sense but also allowed MIS (what IT was called back then) the ability to focus on what needed to be done and not on maintaining the equipment or software.

Since then, shops have become more diversified, and this new effort from IBM considers covering not only IBM hardware but the hardware from competitors and partners as well. But it is the historic capability of being able to effectively manage large numbers of client sites while providing elevated levels of service and meeting service requirements for decades that allows IBM to stand out with this sustainability effort.

Through this knowledge and capability, along with increasing use of AI to automate an ever larger number of operations, IBM believed, and with good reason, that it is uniquely capable of providing a comprehensive sustainability service that allows its clients to get a clear direction as to where the firm needs to invest to not only get the best sustainability results but the most savings resulting from the effort.

As all decisions should start, this service starts with data capture covering the functions being analyzed, the requisite regulations, and the company’s needs and requirements, and then generates a set of recommendations. The client can then use IBM’s other services, its own resources, or services from others to execute the recommendations that the company prioritizes based on the report that has been generated. The services that IBM optionally offers include things like secure data erasure, asset recovery and disposition, deinstall, and packaging and logistics.

Wrapping Up

Firms want to be more sustainable but lack the ability to optimize their sustainability efforts to both have the largest positive impact on the environment while also minimizing the resulting economic impact. IBM’s new Sustainability Optimization Assessment Service can provide a comprehensive report and related certification (including an audit trail) to take the firm to the most profitable and effective sustainability result based on the needs and goals of the company.

It is best practice to use a service that is expert for those things where a company is not. IBM has been an expert on sustainability for decades. Its unique assessment service could be critical to any heterogeneous shop looking for a path to greater sustainability while minimizing related costs.