While a corporate focus on green IT may not attract new outsourcing clients, it's a great market differentiator that may sway a potential client considering different vendors when all other factors are equal.

In Bali, delegates from around the world are meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to hammer out a global agreement to cut carbon emissions.

In the U.S., congressional leaders are preparing to vote on an energy bill that may put limits on greenhouse gases and finance further investments in clean energy and efficiency.

And in India, one IT services provider is beginning to tout its own environmental efforts as a potential selling point.

The company is Bangalore-based ITC Infotech, an independent subsidiary of India's $2.32 billion dollar ITC Ltd. While there's no evidence that ITC Infotech is any "greener" than other outsourcers all by itself, its parent company became carbon-neutral this year.

ITC Infotech managing director Sanjiv Puri would prefer to talk about the fact that his company was certified SEI-CMM 5 (the Software Engineering Institute's highest Capability Maturity Model ranking) when it was launched in 2000; its focus on best-of-breed services in vertical industries such as consumer factory goods, transportation and hospitality; or the IT service provider's financial growth (the company has boasted a compounded annual growth rate of 65 percent since its founding).

But Puri knows that ITC's corporate focus on sustainability has the potential to woo new IT outsourcing customers away from less green competitors. "No one is going to buy our IT services because we're part of ITC, which is carbon positive," says Puri. "Customers have to see the value in the services we bring to the table. We have to be competitive. But, if all other things are equal, we have seen some customers exercise a choice in favor of service providers who are more responsible to society and the environment."

Green IT Growing on Outsourcing Customers

There's little benevolent social responsibility behind the fact that many bottom-line-focused outsourcing customers are beginning to value environmental sustainability in their IT services providers. "Customers are becoming increasingly interested in making their IT operations more power efficient, especially their data centers," says Gianluca Tramacere, IT outsourcing research director for consultancy Gartner. "This is driven primarily by the need to avoid the risk of IT service failure and to reduce cost. The 'carbon footprint label' is helping these initiatives to get more visibility, but I doubt many organizations were moved by a green agenda when they first looked at this issue."