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Despite a baffling economic environment, the Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are eager to invest in initiatives that would reduce the environmental impact of their information technology systems.

According to a global study conducted by IBM and the InfoTech Research Group; more than 55 per cent of Indian firms are going to, or have already, commissioned third-party environmental audits, purchased emission credits, or have made improvements in their supply chain efficiency to reduce energy consumption.

The study is based on a survey of more than 1,000 IT executives at companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees across industries and in a dozen countries including India, the US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK.

The study states that about 63 per cent of the Indian firms have completed a retrofit of existing server rooms to increase energy efficiency, or have a pilot project underway.  Almost two-thirds of all companies globally are currently, or planning within the next 12 months, to add virtualization technology to their servers, consolidate storage systems, or retrofit their server rooms.

The survey found that more than half the companies have implemented some form of energy measurement for their IT infrastructure, and about one-quarter plan to do so in the year ahead. It claimed that while 50 to 60 per cent of Indian, Brazilian, North American and British businesses are up and running with telecommuting and virtual conferencing capabilities, Germany, France, and, to a lesser extent, the Nordic countries have been slower to adopt these technologies.