18/12/2008

Symantec Joins Computers Off Australia Advisory Board

MELBOURNE – AU, 18 December 2008 – Computers Off Australia (COA), a not-for-profit campaign and labelling initiative, developed to help reduce Australia’s IT carbon footprint and labelling organisation committed to greening their IT infrastructure today announced the appointment of  Craig Scroggie, vice president & managing director,Symantec, Pacific region to its board of advisors.

COA is an educational marketing and awareness campaign, combined with a labelling scheme that classify organisations using three colour-coded ticks that represent Power Management (Green), Virtualisation (Blue) and Carbon Neutral (Gold).The environmental certification labelling scheme is designed to help businesses, government and individuals identify organisations that are doing their part in reducing their CO2 emissions by lowering their power consumption.

“I am very pleased to be joining the Computers Off Australia Board of Advisors and am looking forward to helping promote ICT sustainability practices that will reduce Australia’s IT carbon footprint,” said Scroggie.  “We are committed to offering our customers a way to secure and manage their information in an environmentally friendly way. Symantec has developed practices and software tools that apply techniques such as clustering, storage and server virtualisation, storage tiering, data deduplication, and the effective utilisation of power management on PCs to conserve energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve utilisation of IT assets and save money on IT expenditures.”

“Symantec is also dedicated to minimising its own environmental footprint and recently committed to reducing its CO2 emissions by 15 percent by fiscal year 2012. Symantec’s environmental focus is intertwined with the company''s core purpose of securing and managing our customers’ information-driven world.”

Dr Idris F. Sulaiman, CEO of COA said, “Symantec is known for its leadership in the security, storage and systems management industries.  By joining our Board of Advisors, Craig brings with him a wealth of experience to our organisation. His presence will assist COA’s efforts in raising awareness of best practices in ICT energy efficiency among end users and will help promote the adoption of key energy-efficiency measures such as network power management as well as server and desktop virtualisation, which will assist organisations in their march toward carbon neutral computing status.”

Computers Off Australia is also lobbying a number of government agencies and organisations to develop of their green IT strategies in line with the recommendations of the recent Gershon Report. These specifically outlines that government agencies develop a whole-of-government ICT sustainability plan to manage the carbon footprint of their ICT activities and they identify a possible list of quick wins in this area, such as software controlled automatic turn-off of PCs. COA maintains that government agencies that adopt this software will receive COA certification, providing third party validation that they are implementing energy efficiency measures.

COA believes that the opportunity for us here in Australia is to lead by example and show the rest of the world that Australia can be the leaders in energy efficiency with IT and can make a real difference, enabling us to leave our children’s children with a habitable planet.

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