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CDN's 2009 Channel Elite Awards Winners


Gold 2009 CDN Channel Elite Award Winner

Best Channel Marketing Initiative

Softchoice takes green on the road

By Jeff Jedras

Softchoice - Best Channel Marketing Initiative

Recognizing the market demand for information on green IT solutions, the winner for Best Channel Marketing Initiative was recognized for a road-show and program that brought information on green solutions right to the people that wanted it.

Toronto-based solution provider Softchoice, was recognized for its EcoTech Solutions Tour and its EcoTech Solutions brand, which aims to make green solutions and their value easier for IT decision makers to understand and easier to purchase.

Melissa Alvares, sustainability programs manager for Softchoice, said the solution provider’s EcoTech Solutions brand takes the world of green IT and breaks it down into six solution categories: Ecomade (search tool to identify green products), Paper Reducing Technology, Energy Reducing Technology, Travel Reducing Technology, Data Centre Efficiency and Safe Hardware Removal.

“There are so many solutions out there, vendors are developing great solutions, but there’s a lot of confusion on what (customers) can do,” said Alvares. “EcoTech takes the world of green and puts it into these six categories. If someone is interested in having a more efficient data centre, they can go to that portal and find products, white papers, and other resources that we’ve gathered from different sources and handpicked for our portal.”

In addition to information on solutions, products and how Softchoice can help with implementation, the portal also contains information on incentives available from local utility companies, state, provincial and federal governments around rewards for reducing power consumption.

“Governments are putting a lot of money into green IT and we want to make sure we’re bringing that information to our customers, because a lot of these programs aren’t being widely taken advantage of,” said Alvares.

Softchoice also launched its EcoTech Tour that visited six Canadian and U.S. cities in 2008, and was expanded in 2009. More than 150 attendees heard directly from vendors such as HP, Lenovo, APC, Faronics and VMware about their green IT innovations and strategies. And in keeping with the green theme, at each event the menus featured locally-grown foods according to the 100-mile diet.

In the two years she has been in her green role with Softchoice, Alvares said she has seen green IT take off from something that wasn’t talked about too much to becoming an important driving factor in people’s business decisions. The growth in data centre optimization, where the ability to do more with fewer servers, saving rack space and lowering heating and cooling costs, is particularly compelling.

“The business case for green aligns now more than ever,” said Alvares. “It’s not fluff anymore. It’s actually a better way to do business.”

Last year's CDN 2008 Channel Elite Awards Winners