MANILA, Philippines--Software makers such as Microsoft and Oracle are also in a good position to help reduce carbon emissions among companies that use their products, according to analyst Ovum.

The focus on "green IT" has been largely on reducing power consumption in corporate data centers. Thus, hardware makers like IBM have been developing technologies that address this goal.

Warren Wilson, Ovum research director, however, thinks there is too much emphasis on data centers and noted that IT operations overall represent only a small part of the world's total energy consumption.

"Even if one could cut total IT power consumption in half, it wouldn't make much of a dent in the total," Wilson said.

To make real headway in carbon reduction, Wilson said this will require addressing all the non-IT processes where "so much energy is consumed, such as heating and cooling (of buildings, homes, foods and other perishables, and the like), manufacturing and transportation."

However, the data required to effectively manage energy consumption and carbon output is not yet readily available, and this is where Ovum thinks software could play a major role.

"As carbon-reducing regulations proliferate, as utilities deploy more sophisticated metering and billing systems and as the building industry incorporates energy-related controls, as its customers will inevitably demand, this information will become much easier to collect," Wilson said.

"As that happens, enterprise applications are the logical vehicles with which to gather and analyze it," he added

Adding "green capabilities" to business software, according to Ovum, is just expanding on the compliance management features available in today's products. In short, the same principle of making software comply with certain industry regulations also applies to promoting carbon efficiency. Wilson said: "The bottom line is that, despite the early focus on IT-related power consumption and carbon output, it seems clear that there will be a much larger opportunity in addressing the vast majority of power consumption/carbon output that has nothing to do with IT."

"It is this larger market for which software vendors should be positioning themselves to compete," he said.