Rackspace Survey: Businesses Willing to Pay More for Services from 'Green' Vendors

October 2, 2007

Consumers and businesses these days are paying more and more attention to the impact their actions have on the environment. The “green technology” segment of the “green” movement—and the topic of this blog—includes everything from fuel-efficient cars to software the helps people telecommute.

On today’s menu: the efforts data center companies are now making to create “greener” operations by reducing power consumption. Last month, Rackspace Managed Hosting got curious to see how much businesses really care about the “greenness” of the service providers they choose.

Specifically, Rackspace wanted to know if businesses would be willing to pay more for hosting and other data center-based services designed to have minimal impact on the environment. The company sent a survey asking this question to 3,800 of its customers, of which about 10 percent responded.

Fifty-two percent of respondents to the survey indicated that they’d be willing to pay 5-10 percent more to work with a ‘green’ vendor. Also, fifty-one percent of respondents said they were willing to sacrifice 5-10 of server performance in order to reduce carbon emissions.

Although the sampling was pretty small (about 380 customers), the survey does indicate the willingness of businesses to consider ‘greenness’ when choosing which service providers and vendors to work with.

As Rackspace put it: “Green IT vendors are an important element of customers’ green strategies.” How important? Thirty percent of respondents said they expect picking such green vendors will be a central part of their business strategy within five years. Does this describe your business?

See this page in Technorati Technorati book mark in del.icio.us Del.icio.us Slashdot.com Slashdot Submit to Digg.com Digg Bookmark in Furl Furl Bookmark in Spurl Spurl