BUSINESSES AND governments could save $950 billion on their technology spending by 2020 if they embrace sustainable and energy-efficient systems, according to the Innovation Value Institute.

A consortium which includes NUI Maynooth, Intel and the Boston Consulting Group, the institute made the claim at its winter summit which was held in Toronto this week. It has now included “sustainable ICT” as a central component of its framework to manage technology more efficiently.

At the Toronto conference, research was published on six oil and gas companies which adopted this framework that showed they had made their technology spending 33 per cent more efficient by using the institute’s framework.

Mainstream Renewable Power, the wind and solar energy developer headed up by Airtricity founder Eddie O’Connor, has been using the Innovation Value Institute’s framework since the company was founded in 2008.

“We wanted to be a sustainable business from day one,” said John Shaw, Mainstream’s chief information officer, “but the challenge to get basic services established when you are growing in eight countries means you can be tempted to go for short-term approaches.”

Mr Shaw said Mainstream would have had to develop its own framework if it had not adopted the Innovation Value Institute’s IT-CMF (capability maturity framework).

Rather than viewing technology vendors simply as suppliers, Mainstream enters into deep partnerships with companies like HP, Microsoft and Cisco which Mr Shaw said now had a “high degree of awareness” of the need to supply energy-efficient products.

As a brand new company, Mainstream has not had to worry about supporting older technologies. Mr Shaw said technologies such as cloud computing and energy-efficient data centres were at the right stage of maturity to help Mainstream reduce its carbon footprint.

More traditional technologies, such as electronic workflow, managed print services and video conferencing, are also used to reduce energy and resource consumption.

By interviewing job candidates over video rather than face to face, Mr Shaw estimated the company had reduced its travel budget by 20 per cent.

Martin Curley, director of Intel Labs Europe and director of the Innovation Value Institute, said managing technology with the IT-CMF could have a real impact on business costs as well as making them greener. He cited the example of the BMW Sauber Formula 1 racing team which reduced the number of car prototypes it was producing by 80 per cent after working with the institute.