Download Green Telecom Part VI: Verizon a telecom leader

Green Telecom Part VI: Verizon a telecom leader
Carol Wilson
Telephony Online
October 17, 2008
Like every major telecom service provider, Verizon is looking throughout its
organization for ways to reduce its carbon footprint and be more environmentally
conscious. Verizon has taken its efforts one step further, however, to view the broader
picture and work to wield its influence with vendors, customers and fellow service
providers.
That’s one of the reasons the company was cited by Frost & Sullivan for its Green
Excellence of the Year Award in the Corporate Leadership category for the telecom
services industry. In recognizing Verizon, Frost & Sullivan noted that in 2007 alone
Verizon’s energy conservation efforts eliminated an estimated 76,000 metric tons of
carbon dioxide emissions. Verizon achieved this by improving the energy efficiency of
its buildings and by using alternative energy sources such as clean-burning fuel cells or
microturbines for its central offices.
More recently, as part of its 14th annual Network Equipment Building System Forum in
Orlando, Fla., Verizon focused on what the telecom industry in general can be doing not
only to reduce its own energy consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions, but also to
help other industries through the promotion of telecommuting and recycling of
electronics.
“Globally, the information and communications technology segment represents about 2%
of the emissions, but we can make a contribution not only for our own industry, but to
others,” said Chuck Graff, director of corporate network and technology for Verizon,
who headed up the NEBS Forum, which attracted 262 people from 80 companies and
nine countries.
In fact, using its technology to enable corporations to be more environmentally
responsible is a sales opportunity, said Chris Kim, vice president of sales engineering for
Verizon.
“For us, a big piece of what we are realizing is there is a lot of stuff we’ve built over the
years with one problem set in mind that you can apply to the green IT space with real
value,” Kim said. “We are now just trying to make a solution sell. We know we have this
capability; what is the green benefit?”
Verizon’s approach involves making sure the subject matter experts it includes in its
account teams are well-versed on the “green imperative,” Kim said.
“All of our teams have specialized folks in them, whether its security services or
advanced voice technologies, collaboration or IT solutions like hosting and virtual
desktops,” he said. “Those teams are experts on their specific technologies, but they have
also been trained, everybody has, on the ‘green imperative’ and the opportunity it
represents.”
The challenge then is two-fold: try to sell to more customers, but also try to sell
Verizon’s traditional customers on what new, more environmentally friendly
technologies can do for them, Kim said.
Teleworking is one obvious option, and Verizon’s approach is to create remote access
solutions both for road warriors and for home workers, Kim said. “We need to get people
out of the traditional commute and traditional thinking that ‘I need to provide an office
and a desk for every employee and heat and cool that office space and provide lights,’”
he added.
Distributed call centers provide an opportunity for businesses to retain good employees,
lower the contact center costs and provide better business continuity. “There is a green
benefit that falls out of that, but there are other benefits as well,” Kim said.
Right now, the No. 1 issue on the minds of U.S. corporations trying to go green is the
data center, he said.
“There is a shift on, and the phenomenon we see first — because many of our traditional
buyers of Verizon services are going to be in IT and communications fields — is that the
green project on the top of the list revolves around data centers and making them run
more effectively,” Kim said. “That can mean reducing the number of computers or
servers to increase what we can with less space and cooling.”
There also is movement afoot to change the way the network is constructed, to make the
equipment installed on customers’ premises smaller, Kim said.
Many corporations are just now developing more formal approaches to going green, but
most have had ad hoc efforts for some time, he said. What Verizon is trying to do is to
help its customers address telecom network issues on a broader scale.
“Sometimes the ad hoc structure evolves into something that is more sustainable, but we
don’t see that everywhere yet,” Kim said. “That could change after the election, since
whether McCain or Obama gets elected, there is the real possibility of mandates.”
Because enterprises today are extended, with lots of business partners and suppliers as
well as mobile workers, the solution to enabling communication while reducing travel
and improving efficiency is a complex one, which includes issues such as security and
new technologies such as high-definition video conferencing.
“There is an explosion of new very high-quality video and audio from companies such as
Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, and we have put in a handful of systems internally,” Kim
said. “What’s been surprising are the utilization stats. We’ve had almost 50% utilization
with very little in farming effort to drive people to behave. We think it’s because the
video part got to the ‘good enough’ threshold.”
Verizon is able to manage those high-end conferencing services for its customers and
also use IP technology to enable trends such as “hoteling”: building office space that can
accommodate a different set of workers, depending on the day and time.
“Office space — heating, cooling and lighting buildings — is the single biggest emitter
of greenhouse gases in the U.S.,” Kim said. “If you can get to a cap and trade system
[using emission credits], we can optimize the way we build office space. This doesn’t
happen overnight. Real estate tends to be a lagger because of long-term leases,
construction times, etc., but we are already seeing it in the way big companies are
constructing office space to do things like hoteling. IP telephony enables that because it
lets me make the phone on my desk be my number. And with modern LAN and 802.1
technology, it’s easy to be flexible, easy to find a printer and easy to be secure.”
Another key element is providing centrally located, secure storage for corporate data that
can be accessed remotely, also on a secure basis.
Some of what Verizon is trying to do is pretty basic: convincing customers to power off
PCs when they are not being used and to eliminate paper transactions, Kim said.
“It’s something that is not necessarily as intuitive but has a huge environmental benefit
when compare to how business-to-business transactions are done today,” he said. “It
starts with paper purchase order and ends with paper check.
More than 7 million Verizon bills were viewed and paid online in 2007, saving 387 tons
of paper. “And this is not just about cutting down trees to create paper — it’s all the
transportation costs involved to move all that paper around,” Kim said. “Imagine giant
multinational companies; sending them a phone bill every month involves 20 cases.
What’s the environmental impact of driving all that across town? So we made a big push
with the Verizon Enterprise Center to give people opportunities not to send paper.”
In some ways, the green initiative is not unlike the Y2K issue, when concerns about the
new millennium justified budget expenses of upgrading major computing systems, Kim
said. “The companies that really succeed are the ones that use this to make the shrewdest
choices to drive productivity and make the workforce more effective,” he added.
Coming next: Verizon’s internal efforts to reduce its energy consumption
Previously: Part One of this series looked at AT&T’s green initiatives, while Part Two
reported on Callis Communications’ effort to reduce power used by voice-over-IP gear.
Part Three focused on iControl’s efforts to help service providers leverage home security
system sales to also promote home automation and energy savings. Part Four explored
new technology from Telco Systems to use solar power for data centers. Part Five looked
at how Emerson Network Power is taking a comprehensive approach to reducing power
consumption by its wireline and wireless customers.