The lure of green IT

Recent IT trends have exacerbated the problems of machine density and energy consumption, says GCN.

Federal data centres are under great pressure to go green, not only because it is politically correct, but because power consumption has become a tipping point as agencies assess potential return on investment from migrating to new systems.

New federal data-sharing efforts coupled with consolidated systems and service-oriented architectures have forced federal IT managers to seek new levels of processing power. Concurrently, budgets are constrained. In many cases, this has prompted government IT managers to shift to lower-cost x86 architectures in recent years.

Enterprise architecture (EA) goes beyond technology alone, says Gartner. Tied to ever-changing business directions, it is a dynamic and agile process that helps define the future state required to meet that business direction.

Practitioners in this discipline provide guidance as to how business and IT can work together to solve business challenges.

Impacting organisations' ability to mobilise technology for business advantage is a task every enterprise architect wants to take on. However, the daily pressures and demands of system delivery and operations often get in the way of creating and using an effective EA, notes Gartner.

Alfabet, a provider of strategic IT planning and enterprise architecture management, has announced record results for the first half of 2007, reports dBusiness news.

The company says revenue was up 27% and bookings increased 85% for the first six months of the year versus the same period in 2006.

It says it now has about 16 000 users in over 40 countries. To help deliver against this increased demand, Alfabet grew its employee base by 29% since the beginning of 2007.