Cisco Cisco Energy Management for Distributed Offices Libro bianco
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 1 of 4
White Paper
Bridging the Gap between Facilities and IT to
Reduce Energy Costs across the Enterprise
Reduce Energy Costs across the Enterprise
Introduction
Energy is one of the largest unmanaged expenses in any organization. Organizations around the world are quickly
discovering the power of enterprise energy management systems for gaining detailed visibility and control over
their plug load, the vast majority of which is composed of IT devices.
When it comes to implementing an enterprise energy management system, it is essential to have collaboration
between the facilities and IT groups within an organization. Though these departments deliver different services to
the organization, they operate very similarly. Yet they rarely have the opportunity to work with one another. The IT
department focuses on delivering compute services to all of the people in the organization, whereas the facilities
department provides management of physical space and power. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1. Bridging the Gap between Facilities and IT
Both departments strive to deliver a reliable and stable service to the rest of the enterprise. The energy concerns of
each department are different, however. Facility managers need to make sure that costs are kept as low as
possible, while still delivering the necessary amount of power to the company. IT is under pressure to deliver ever
increasing computing capabilities to the business, while also maintaining service-level agreements.
The challenge here lies in the fact that an energy management implementation requires that IT act as a service
provider to the facilities department, since the facilities organization is typically the economic benefactor. Facility
management hasn’t traditionally had the opportunity to work with IT as a service provider, because it generally
management hasn’t traditionally had the opportunity to work with IT as a service provider, because it generally
doesn't have many projects that require IT for implementation.
In order to begin building a bridge between IT and facilities, it is important to understand some primary differences
between these groups.