Press Release

AH Technology becomes certified under the Computers Off Australia Green IT labelling initiative

Canberra / Melbourne, 6 October 2009

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 has today announce AH Technology's Power Management (Green) certification.

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.

Amir Har-el, Managing Director of AH Technology said, "As citizens of the world, we can no longer be just bystanders letting the world goes by without responding. Like many other 'revolutions' and changes, the change should start at 'home' – at our company. In our case, it could not be any different. What excuse do we have not to save energy when the product we market, 1E NightWatchman, has over four million licenses deployed worldwide, together delivering annual electricity savings in the vicinity of 200-240 million dollars?" "This is why, when we came across the "Computers Off Australia (COA)" Campaign, the question was not 'if'', but 'when', or more accurately, 'How fast can we join COA'".

"If there are still CEOs out there that think that Green IT is bad for business, they have to think again. Green IT is as much about the financial motivation as it is about reducing the environmental impact of operating IT and the business. So if they don't realise the savings and the quick ROI, they are not fulfilling their role to advance their companies", said Harel.

Mark Winter, Founder of COA said, "When any IT power management provider has made a commitment to developing Green IT awareness in Australia and the Asia Pacific region, this is a great start; however we are interested in what organisation are doing internally and not what they develop." "AH Technology has raised their hand as not only distributing a number of eco-friendly technologies, but they are also taking action and have implemented internal green IT policies that comply with the COA certification." "We see that besides AH Technology, there are many other vendors and organisations that still need to step up to the challenges of Green IT and certify to show their real commitment to the environment. COA certification is one way to stop the "green washing" that we are seeing in the market place today," Winter concluded.

The objectives of the 'Computers Off' campaign is going far beyond just switching off PCs by developing practical programs being offered to the Information and Communication Technologies industry to improve energy efficiency and deal with global climate change.

The Computers Off 'label' has been created as the computer industry's guide to help business, government and individuals quickly and easily identify organisations that are doing their part to reduce their power consumption and in turn reducing their CO2 emissions. This non-for-profit initiative supports an industry-wide target to achieve drastic improvement in Australia's and global's computer energy efficiency by 2010. It has been estimated that "by 2010, about half of the Forbes Global 2000 companies will spend more on energy than on computing hardware such as PCs and servers."

Australians as individuals can now make a real, tangible and 'easy' difference to our environment – on a national and global scale – by turning off or powering down their computers when not in use as well as optimising energy use of other computing equipment. However, for business, government and educational organisation, it makes sense to consider central power management of PCs and other energy efficient Green IT measures as they can provide significant savings, reduce energy use and emissions as well as provide better energy and emissions reporting of ICT infrastructure use.

Industry associations including the (AIIA) Australia Information Industry Association has provided their endorsements and support behind this campaign and labelling initiative. At a recent "The Standing Agenda" event on the Green ICT "Quick Wins" (in the context of the government Gershon Report) organised by the AIIA in Canberra, AH Technology has shown leadership in taking the role of principal sponsor of the event with COA as co-sponsor.

The opportunity for us here in Australia is to lead by example and show the rest of the world that we can achieve something that we probably didn't think possible. By coming together and turning our computers off when they are not being used as a start, not only can we can make a real difference so we can leave our children's children with a habitable planet.