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MP    Mark Prior

MP: Bell-Mark Systems is an IT life cycle management business.  We’ve been in business now for just over 14 odd years and, over that time; we have managed the in-going IT assets of many businesses and also managed the graceful exit of a lot of those assets.  And with increasing environmental and regulatory concerns around the environment and also, obviously, with the economic crisis that we all face today, our services have been tailored to deliver a cradle to grave approach.  That is to manage the entry of new IT but obviously, associated with that, there is the replacement of an existing IT estate, and our life cycle management practice delivers best practice methodologies to manage the graceful exit of that estate whilst securing the data assets and removal of those assets to stringent government and regulatory approvals, but also to then reduce the overall carbon footprint of that previous estate.

The factors that influence Bell to deliver this IT life cycle practice have been very much driven by our customer demands and by demands on both economic and environmental pressures.  And our service very, very simply tries to blend those assets together.  So, to take away what is not good for the environment and, in so doing, manage the entry of new equipment into that estate, which not only meets the business requirement but also delivers against the corporate social responsibility of that customer to its clients and to its consumers.  Carbon reduction and green IT as a whole in the midst of this recession are, we believe, to be hand in hand.  It is our belief that the majority of client assets can actually produce a positive capital return when securely disposed of under appropriate authority that actually will then offset the cost of implementing a better, greener computing practice to that customer.  Some of our customers are very large international telecommunications or finance companies, and in one particular instance, Right Move came to us and they had a very simple problem.  They wanted to deliver more computing power to their web infrastructure to deliver their service but, at the same time, they had power constraints in terms of the energy going into their data centres and, a combination of our services, we delivered a 92% power saving to their data centre.

Bell practices what it preaches.  We undertook a programme just over 18 months ago to become a carbon neutral business, which we are now, in association with Carbon Clear.  So we’ve implemented a number of virtualisation and consolidation practices within our own computing environment.  Where we cannot take out our carbon footprint, we’ve entered into a carbon reduction programme with Carbon Clear to produce Bell as a carbon neutral business.  Having a carbon neutral business is almost as essential as having a VAT number when doing business with that particular customer.