Visionaire and Environmental Sustainability

For Visionaire Sustainability practice is a way of life. While sustainability trends present a range of environmental challenges, we are focusing our interest on the opportunity to bring additional value and services, through improved delivery systems and technologies to our customers and participating in the Global Carbon footprint reduction process.

From our early years (1995) we have infused the people at Visionaire with awareness of global warming and the corresponding environmental responsibilities and to be better corporate citizens. New employees joining our workforce go through a series of CSR presentations including their personal viewing of the Al Gore produced movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. We are enthused with corporate social responsibility principles, knowledge, technologies, and methods that will lead to better management of our company and better long-term solutions for our customers — solutions that respond to critical issues such as carbon management and how this affects the business realities of our customers and partners.

Our key contributions to environmental sustainability occur through working with customers and partners who have gained environmental leadership in their fields and hence challenge us with a constant need to provide a higher level of delivery on the environmental mandate by the effective and efficient use of ICT technologies in creating integrated project work such as green data centers, virtualization practices, telepresence and video conferencing, rich media development and intelligent management of assets to reduce the consumption of energy and related opportunities in reduction of the need for human travel, thermal load, intelligent building systems management and reduced need for human resource allocation to support and maintenance tasks.

Visionaire’s Green Vision

Carbon Emission & Energy Management Targets:

Work Practice Change

• Target to hold 50% of impromptu company meetings in Standing Meeting Rooms.
• Initiate an on-line work culture for data sharing, file sharing and collaborative work practices.
• Automate 85% of tasks that require signed approvals.
• Reward innovative thinking and examples set by employees for working in virtualized spaces.

Materials and Equipment

• Implement 100% virtualized computing environment in the office.
• Refurbish and donate existing ICT equipment to needy schools.
• Decrease paper use per person by 25% by implementing a network based document management system.
• Use 60% recycled paper of total paper purchases.

Energy, Water and Travel

• Host all central web-based services and portals of the company at 100% Wind-Powered Data Centers.
• Generate atleast 30% of energy use in the campus from alternate sources -solar energy
• Encourage reduction of 25% of travel costs by replacing such need with telepresence based meetings and collaboration.
• Recycle 70% of waste water to use in building irrigation systems.
• At-least 70% of company owned vehicles in permissible countries to operate of low emission CNG.

The Sustainable ICT Practice

Climate change associated with green house gas (GHG) emissions is one of the most pressing public policy issues in the world today. Individuals and companies are looking for ways in which they can contribute to the debate and initiatives they can put into place to make a positive contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

The ICT sector and ICT professionals are becoming increasingly concerned about energy consumption and subsequent carbon dioxide emissions from commercial ICT equipment. However, ICT’s share estimate of global GHG emissions (2.5 %) is much smaller than its share of Gross Domestic Product (which is around 8 per cent of US GDP, for instance). As the ICT industry is growing faster than the rest of the economy, it is likely that this share will increase over time.  The main output of the ICT Sector is information rather than physical goods (“bits”, not “atoms”), a concept sometimes referred to as “dematerialization”. Thus, ICTs can contribute greatly to finding a solution to reducing the remaining 97.5 % of global emissions from other sectors of the economy.

Visionaire suggests the establishment of a strong Green ICT policy that promotes the following initiatives to help ICT professionals reduce carbon dioxide emissions from ICT equipment:

• Implement and assist in the implementation of a green ICT policy outlining initiatives to reduce the organization’s carbon footprint and guidelines on the safe disposal of old technology;
• Leverage innovative technologies to reduce power consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions;
• Provide Green ICT certification for sites that are implementing network based power and electronic asset management to create an intelligent automated network domain that focuses on energy conservation.
• Implement emissions offset programs to help offset the emissions being produced by ICT equipment used in the office.
• Look at replacing PBX or KTS equipment with soft phone clients on computer workstations and to hand-held mobile devices.
• Look at combining the communications server onto existing servers using virtualisation technology;
• Examine the feasibility and promoting the use of virtualisation technology to significantly reduce the number of servers in use;
• Implement desktop virtualisation using ultra-small, secure clients on the desktop and linking the thin clients to their own virtual desktop machines residing on servers. With desktop environment consolidated within the data centre, firms can deliver secure, isolated desktops that consume less energy.
• Disable screen savers and implement ‘sleep mode’ for periods of inactivity for ICT equipment;
• Provide sustainability reporting and operations practices.