How Verizon Does Green Computing

It takes a lot of power to run a wireless network that serves 60 million customers and handles billions of calls each month. So John Hinshaw, chief information officer for Verizon Wireless, should know all about energy costs. For the past 18 months, Hinshaw has been looking for energy-efficient technology that can help the company lower its power consumption, from the desktops that support its 65,000 employees to the hardware that fills its data and call centers.

His work is starting to pay off: By cutting the number of data centers from 10 to 3, Hinshaw has helped the company save $20 million. In a recent conversation with BusinessWeek.com writer Rachael King, Hinshaw outlines just how the joint venture of Verizon Communications (VZ) and Vodafone (VOD) is saving money.

The data center environment is the most power-hungry by far, and what we've done over the past several years is reduce the number of applications that we run at Verizon Wireless in order to simplify the customer experience—one billing system, one sales system, one customer care system. That requires a lot less hardware to run than if you had multiple systems.

It's allowed us to reduce what we had—10 data centers consuming a ton of power just a few years ago. Now we have three data centers, and that's through rationalizing all these applications. That's probably the biggest area. I think we've avoided roughly $20 million in build-out costs by being more efficient in our data centers.