As the Director of Global Information Services for Bangalore-based Applied Materials, Nagaraj Bhat is no greenhorn in the field of IT, having seen the firm's India centre evolve into an IT services outpost to a critical R & amp;D unit over the past three years, Now, Bhat, a mechanical engineer and a trained business continuity pro, is taking the lead in driving Applied Materials' Green IT thrust. The global IT organisation aims to achieve a fifth of the firm's greenhouse gas reduction goal.

"Green IT started as a project at Applied Materials and has evolved into an integrated part of everything we do, says Bhat. Reason? Tech companies are aggressively implementing green IT solutions as part of their offshoring contracts signed with customers.

So, Applied Materials' green drive now covers virtualisation, optimisation, technology refresh and unified communication and this strong focus is generating demand for a whole new line of green IT specialists. There is a growing demand for sustainability engineers, data centre management engineers, utilities and electric engineers and quality specialists. According to some industry estimates, the global technology industry consumes 1.5-2 per cent of the world's power supply and this metric is growing at 12 per cent annually.

HCL offers a Green Datacenter Solution programme that works towards increasing energy efficiency and reducing carbon and physical footprint of datacentres while complying with government mandates.

To work in these fields of Green IT, a professional must understand datacentre design, power circuits, use software to improve server and storage utilisation and at the end discern the business benefits from all this.

Green IT, in AMD's case, looks across multiple areas, including chip design, desktops, servers and datacentres. "To work in Green IT, you must be able to examine a client's IT infrastructure and put together a concrete proposal to make it more environmentally-friendly and more importantly, reduce costs, he says.