"There has been a lot of vendor hype the past year, especially because of the Copenhagen deal in December," remarks Tratz-Ryan. "Vendors have been ramping on how businesses can adopt green IT as a principle in their respective organizations."

The Copenhagen climate change conference held in December aimed at gathering various heads of state into an agreement on how to approach the climate change problem, especially since the timeframe for the Kyoto Protocol--an earlier agreement between companies to cut on carbon emissions--would soon lapse in 2012. The accord, unfortunately, didn't fall through, with "superpowers" unable to agree on a consensus.

Regardless of the effects of the Copenhagen meet, vendors continued to ramp up their green IT offerings. Proposing to companies based on environmental sustainability, however, has become a dicey road taken by vendors, due largely to the financial crisis that overwhelmed most firms in 2009. "The new strategy now mirrors a perspective based on operational savings," Tratz-Ryan explains.

With this scenario, Tratz-Ryan believes realism is slowly setting in. "Green computing is now going through a phase of realistic assessment," she posits. "Vendors need to assess if they will still take the costsavings route, or address the issue through an entire value chain of design."

A Green Supply Chain