An email conversation with John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, on the subject of the company's recently-issued Rackspace Green Survey for June 2008.
By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
July 15, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In late June, Rackspace (rackspace.com) issued the results of a survey it had conducted among its customers, attempting to gather and understand their feelings about the notion of "green" hosting.
The survey was not the first step into green territory for Rackspace, which has been pursuing an environmentally gentler service, officially, for approximately a year through its Greenspace Initiative - a company-wide program that will see Rackspace pursue a "more environmentally friendly way of doing things" through a combination of conservation within the organization, more green customer offerings and employee education.
A more exhaustive source of information on the Greenspace Initiative is located on the company's website.
As part of the overall project, Rackspace published a survey of 3,000 in September of last year, seeking to gauge their interest, generally, in green products, as well as their willingness to either pay a premium or sacrifice performance to improve the environmental impact of their businesses.
The 2008 survey afforded the company the opportunity to compare notes with the previous year's results, creating a somewhat thin but nevertheless compelling picture of trends and changing attitudes among Rackspace customers.
Perhaps surprisingly, giving the seemingly increasing prominence of green attitudes and services, the 2008 results showed a decrease in the willingness to pay a premium for green services, and in some cases a general disinterest in green services.
One of the 2008 survey results, with 14 percent "not green" and "not thinking about it."
From 2007 to 2008, the percentage of customers unwilling to pay a premium for green services rose from 8 percent to 30 percent. And in 2008 14 percent responded that they were "not green and not thinking about it," a question that wasn't asked in 2007.
In both years, however, a similarly high number - about 70 percent - of customers said they would choose to work with a green vendor over a non-green vendor if the price were the same, a statistic that might still be encouraging, if not particularly profitable, for the determined environmentalist.
In an email interview with theWHIR, Rackspace CTO John Engates expanded on the findings from the surveys, and helped to further explain some of the thinking behind Rackspace's green initiative.
Could you describe the intent of the survey itself, and more generally the role it plays in the Greenspace initiative?
JE: We surveyed about 3,000 of our largest customers based on revenue. These are not necessarily the biggest companies, just the customers that have the larger configurations with us. The goal of the survey was to see what our customers were looking for when it came to Green IT. We were curious if their spending habits or server performance needs had changed since last year when we did our initial survey. We wanted to reinforce that the progress we were making through Greenspace was justified and congruent to what our customers were asking for.
It seems like the survey is generally concerned with collecting customer attitudes about green services (and their willingness to pay a premium, for instance). To what extent does Rackspace intend to be influenced by those attitudes? And to what extent are you setting out to influence them?
JE: I think it's a little of both. We want to know what our customers are willing to spend and provide products and services that they want and are willing to pay for. We already have more cost effective and energy efficient offerings such as virtualization and our cloud platform offering through Mosso.
It appears that customers are growing less inclined to spend on green IT services, which I'll admit I find surprising. How do you imagine the results of the survey will impact Rackspace's environmental efforts?
JE: It shows us that we need to continue to pressure our vendors to provide more energy efficient and cleaner products. The survey showed we are on the right track with our Green Server Configuration, virtualization and Mosso, but there are definitely more things we can do. Our new data center in Slough, UK is a step in the right direction, powering it on renewable energy. Carbon emissions are a big concern and right now we offer carbon offsets through a partnership with NativeEnergy, but it will take working with Dell and our other vendors to continue to improve on the physical servers to reduce those emissions.
This is maybe a bit redundant given the last few questions, but is there a relationship between "how environmental responsibility plays into its customers business decisions" (as the survey outlines its objective) and how those considerations play into Rackspace's decisions?
JE: I think if it plays into a customer's business decision, then it plays into Rackspace's. Rackspace is a service company that always wants to do right by the customer. If our customers want us to be more green, then that's what we'll do. In some cases, it just makes good business sense to be green.
In the press release you say "Rackspace believes that environmental responsibility is still a growing concern for hosting customers, but that customers may not be willing to be exposed to higher costs to address them." Are there other indicators you're measuring or even just noticing, other than willingness to spend money, of customers' concern about environmental responsibility?
JE: When we first launched our Greenspace Initiative in June of last year, we had a "green" marketing promo. All this promo did was highlight our Greenspace initiative and our Green Server Configurations. There were not discounts or incentives and yet this was the most successful promo with more page views and click-throughs than any other promo we've ever run.
