What IT Wants From The Next White House

JULIENNE GIVOT Bio: Director of Managed Services, Varsity Technologies, San Franciso, Calif. Endorsing: Declined to state The Skinny: Givot hopes the government accelerates its promotion of energy-efficient, environmentally friendly technology for ecological reasons, and also hopes it will drive job creation in the Green IT sector.

WHAT SHE WANTS FROM THE NEXT PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION:

The next administration should devote more energy and attention to the environment and creating environmental jobs. Hopefully that would lead to some job creation in the technology market. Ideally the government would be able to go even further in incentivizing Green IT, with tax incentives and by promoting the use of virtualization and recyclable hardware.

Green IT definitely has a cool factor, but in terms of the business impact, you are also looking at the life cycle of your infrastructure. Our customers are very interested in Green IT for this reason. Our education and nonprofit clients are more focused on that sort of thing because they can get more grants, for example, if they're using Green IT. So it's not that difficult of a sell for us.

Given the current state of the economy, people are really seeing the value of energy-saving technology. We work in the education and non-profit sector, so it will probably be six to eight months before we see a recession begin to affect our budgets. We're promoting virtualization along with infrastructure upgrades, which is a little bit easier for our clients to invest in now, because they know that they will realize savings in the long term.

Next: Dan Lyons