Green and IT services ?

New business ideas always are crafted and one such thing could be the one that links Green movement and IT.

Just like Y2K era of the last decade, there may be some business potential in the overlapping space of IT consulting and Green. I believe that there is a business landscape for 2 kinds of companies

1) The IT tech majors who have consulting practices. They can create a new consulting practice on "Green IT"

2) Niche startup companies whose core expertise lie in advising, consulting its customers towards 'Green movement', Carbon credits etc ..

The above market is expected to be around $ 4.8 Billion by 2015 and this year around $500 M.

From the Zdnet Blog -

Forrester’s green IT analyst, Christopher Mines, believes there are three primary stages to green IT projects:
- An assessment to collect information on energy usage and carbon footprint; this can take two to 10 weeks and cost between $30,000 and $100,000 depending on scale
- A planning engagement to set parameters for green IT procurement, data-center efficiency measures and other IT projects that could feed into a company’s larger corporate agenda. This phase would take six to 20 weeks and could cost from $50,000 to $400,000
- And, finally, implementation, for which your company might pay $300,000 to $2 million for the services alone. (Not including the moo-lah you would have to lay out for new hardware and/or software.)

Isnt this a big enough to bet your horses on ??