India's Greenest Outsourcer?
Indian IT services provider ITC Infotech is touting its carbon-neutral status as a selling point. And that corporate focus on sustainability has the potential to woo new IT outsourcing customers away from less green competitors.
ITC Infotech's parent company has its own reasons for emphasizing corporate—and environmental—responsibility. ITC, formerly the Imperial Tobacco Company of India, began as a cigarette manufacturer. The 100-year-old conglomerate (still the biggest cigarette maker in India) has since expanded its corporate footprint to include paper, hotels, apparel, agribusiness, transportation and, of course, IT. And each of those businesses comes with its own environmental baggage. So, much the same way an oil company like BP chooses to accent its efforts to offset the damage its products do, ITC in recent years has made it a point to focus on what it calls its "triple bottom line": economic, social and environmental capital. "By the nature of the industry they operate in, ITC promotes many community-driven initiatives," says Eugene Kublanov, CEO of outsourcing advisory neoIT. "Being carbon neutral is part of that."
Whatever the motives, the company is making headway. ITC is among the first 10 companies in the world—and the first from India—to publish a sustainability report in compliance with the latest G3 guidelines of the Netherlands-based Global Reporting Initiative. ITC says it has not only become carbon neutral (through energy conservation and investments in large-scale plantations) but is also "water positive" (the company has increased water conservation and its rainwater harvesting efforts so it produces more water than it consumes). ITC says it is also making strides toward its goal of producing net zero solid waste.
Its outsourcing subsidiary ITC Infotech built its global development center campus in the heart of Bangalore (made of 36 repurposed cigarette warehouses) using recycled materials and optimizing energy usage in its data centers by using virtualization tools. The IT services provider has also worked with its parent company on a digital infrastructure initiative to connect India's rural farmers to the Internet using solar panels for power so they can monitor global pricing trends, conduct crop research and monitor the weather. ITC's triple bottom line "permeates all facets of our business," says Puri.
The Future of Sustainability in IT Services
Environmental responsibility has started to show up on the agenda of other IT outsourcing providers, most visibly at U.S.-based vendors. IBM made a splash earlier this year announcing Project Big Green, a pledge of $1 billion per year across its businesses to "dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT." Accenture and CSC are at the top of outsourcing consultancy Brown Wilson Group's Green 50 list of outsourcers (For more, see "Top 10 Green IT Outsourcers"). But Indian IT services companies have shown less interest in pursuing green IT initiatives. "[U.S. providers] are a bit more attuned to what their customers are going to need before being asked," says Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, author of Building a Future with BRICs: The Next Decade of Offshoring. "I have talked to several of the Indian IT companies, even in the past six weeks or so, and found them totally puzzled by the green issue and why they would need to start considering it." Green technology has not gotten much media attention in India either, says neoIT's Kublanov. "I doubt that the Indian players are thinking seriously of incorporating green IT," he says.
