Current estimates are that the average PC is only in active use 4 hours each work day while idle for another 5.5 hours. Other estimates stipulate that 30-40% of office computers are left fully powered on even outside business hours when not in use. The alarming rise of the cost of electricity worldwide in recent years has enterprises seeking new ways to save money while lowering their carbon footprint. Can your organisation afford to not implement a power management plan?

In the past, green IT tended to concentrate on the data center, which ironically, is not where most of the energy is consumed. In a typical organisation desktop workstations greatly outnumber servers. Servers are require to be on at all times so there is not nearly as much potential savings as with desktops that are often idle. The normal practice at many sites is to leave computers powered on at all times. In a typical 45-hour workweek, client workstations are potentially left powered on unnecessarily for 123 out of 168 hours, or 73% of the time. Implementing an environmentally friendly energy saving plan will greatly reduce your enterprise's power usage and environmental impact, which translates to lower electrical costs and a better enterprise-wide image.

Deploying network-based software, such as LANrev, to implement power saving policies that reflect user behavior and work schedules is the easiest and most effective way to drastically reduce your organisation's energy consumption.

• Unlike many other products, LANrev is fully cross platform and can manage energy settings for both your Windows and Macintosh workstations.
• LANrev not only tells you what the current power management settings are on client machines but also lets you assign multiple power saving profiles to clients. Configure profiles based on power connectivity, day/time, or login status.
• Regardless of how many power profiles are assigned to a client, the most energy efficient profile is always enforced, ensuring maximum energy savings.

For example, you can set one profile to shut down the machine on Friday nights, another to standby/sleep clients during business hours after a certain amount of inactivity, and yet another to standby/sleep clients outside of business hours when no user is logged in.

Many enterprises have recently come to recognise that implementing a power management program not only benefits the environment but also their balance sheets. It certainly doesn't hurt that implementing an energy management policy also saves your company money and can even pay for your LANrev client management software within short order. A power management plan not only improves the bottom line but also improves your organisation's environmental credentials both internally and with the public at large.