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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.