Cisco tops the Cool IT Greenpeace Leaderboard; Oracle comes in dead last
Greenpeace has once again declared that Cisco is the greenest IT company — by a long shot. Cisco scored 70 out of 100 points on the eco-watchdog’s Cool IT Leaderboard. The No. 2 spot, earned by Ericsson, was 57 points.
This is the second year that Cisco topped the leaderboard. There are 17 companies on it, representing those Greenpeace feels are in a position of power in their particular IT field.
Oracle was on the list for the first time, thanks to its purchase of Sun Microsystems. But Greenpeace didn’t like Oracle anymore than the open source advocates do. It landed dead last, garnering itself a mere 12 points.
Greenpeace sifts through each company’s Web site, marketing literature and other public documents and then awards points in three categories: climate solutions, energy impact, political advocacy. Climate solutions represents the IT company’s efforts to develop save-the-world products and services. In Cisco’s case, Greenpeace found that “Cisco sets the bar” for EnergyWise and Home Energy Monitoring, and collaboration technologies, such as WebEx and TelePresence.
It’s curious that Cisco outscored IBM in this area, given that IBM has a massive investment in what it calls Smart Planet technologies (as we all know from IBM’s TV commercials). But Greenpeace wasn’t sold that IBM’s large-scale approach had mass-adoption appeal and it didn’t understand the assumptions used by IBM to measure its claimed environmental savings.
Cisco earned lots of points for providing calculators [link: Powerpoint] to the public that show how much energy is saved by using its products (link to calculator: Flash) The models used in Cisco’s calculators have been validated by a third-party, although to be sure, these are just online calculators — they don’t measure actual emissions.
Cisco also scored high for declaring a goal to reduce its absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2012, compared to 2007 emissions. Greenpeace didn’t particularly call out Cisco’s water conservation efforts. Cisco Subnet blogger awarded the company his own award for installing waterless urinals.
It did get a few points for political advocacy, mostly in taking public stances against Proposition 23 in the last election, a bill that messed with California’s global warming legislation. But Greenpeace wasn’t all that happy about Cisco’s advocacy work, particularly because it does more in Europe. The organization said, “While Cisco did finally weigh in to oppose Proposition 23 in California, its policy advocacy in the U.S remains far behind its efforts in the EU, and stronger statements from CEO John Chambers on the need for government policies to drive IT solutions would significantly enhance Cisco’s leadership standing.”
And it scored zero points for “negative lobby” — meaning Cisco is not putting pressure on any of its business association groups to squash pollution-causing agendas.
While I applaud Cisco for its No. 1 spot on Greenpeace’s list, it is still a little disappointing that the best of the bunch could only earn 70 points while all but three earned less than 50. Clearly there’s a lot more the IT industry can be doing to clean up its own act.
