IBM, also known by its moniker "Big Blue", made the color green stand out as a concept at the recently concluded Business Partner Leadership Conference here as it made the "new enterprise data center" one of its three major focus areas - the other two are emerging markets and Blue Business application platform for collaborative software.

Sam Palmisano, chair and CEO of IBM, said during his presentation that new technologies such as virtualization, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and Web 2.0 are paving the way for the emergence of "new enterprise data center."

"The data center is now the point of optimization," declared Palmisano, adding that IBM is taking the move as a pro-active investment decision and not because of profit since the company is earning from its current product line-up.

Research firm Gartner Group estimates that more than 70 percent of global 1000 companies will radically change their data centers in the next five years.

Rich Lechner, vice president for enterprise systems at IBM, said energy demands have put data centers at a tipping point. "Green IT is not going away that’s why going into this headlong," he said.

The official recalled the company’s Project Big Green, launched in May of 2007, in which IBM has committed to reallocate billion a year to guarantee research and development funding for IT energy efficiency technology. IBM itself has recycled more than one billion pounds of IT equipment removed from clients’ data centers, he said.

Lechner said IT energy demand is expected to double every nine to 24 months, and by 2011, clients are expected to spend the same amount of money on power and cooling with the money they spend on hardware.

The IT sector, the executive said, accounts for two percent of the carbon dioxide emissions in the world.

"Electronic waste, or eWaste, cannot be ignored - one billion computers are potential scrap by 2010."

As additional initiatives, IBM said it will develop a new business partner program to expand support for best practices and skills that will help its clients move to new enterprise data centers, which are more energy efficient, virtualized, secure and resilient.

The program will provide new enterprise data center-specific marketing and sales benefits for partners that achieve specialization, such as co-marketing benefits, assistance with education, enhanced margin opportunities, pre-sales assessment funding, pre-sales technical assistance, and an emblem program.

IBM has also announced new energy-management software, an expansion of its energy certificates program, and an energy benchmark to allow its clients establish energy efficiency goals and verify their green IT progress across the enterprise.

The new offerings for energy measurement include: IBM Active Energy Manager software to measure power usage of key elements of the datacenter, from IT systems to chilling and air conditioning units; an expansion of IBM’s Energy Certificates program to 34 countries; and an online energy assessment benchmark.

Lastly, the tech firm announced it is creating an alliance program for independent hardware and software vendors to support industry standards for new enterprise data centers, allowing them to collaborate to highlight the importance of interoperability and open standards for new enterprise data centers -- including those for energy management, virtualization, networking, security, and service management, among others -- is a focal point of this program.

The following IT vendors are part of the program: Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun Microsystems, and VMware.