Cisco hires green guru for super-green HQ

Cisco has hired one of the founders of the ‘Green Grid’, Paul Marcoux, to be its new environmental guru.

The Green Grid, is an industry consortium – of which Cisco is a contributing member - dedicated to improving data centre power efficiency through the use of agreed metrics. Marcoux was APC's director of education and training.

He now becomes a VP of engineering in the Cisco Development Organisation (CDO), and is responsible for driving green initiatives both inside Cisco, and externally with customers and the market.

The company has also announced its ‘greenest office’, its new St Louis regional headquarters, built to meetLEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) criteria for environmental friendliness and energy efficiency.

The building's construction featured tracking and recycling of old materials during tear out, installing new materials with recycled content and using environmentally friendly paints and furniture. There are individual workstation task lights to reduce energy consumption. The building is also powered by renewable energy.

John Moses, who heads the HQ, said it is the first of many LEED-certified offices which Cisco will build in the next few years as part of Cisco CEO John Chambers' Carbon to Collaboration initiative. The Cisco head committed to reduce Cisco's greenhouse gas emissions from air travel by 10 percent during fiscal years 2007 and 2008.

The idea is to use videoconferencing, with Cisco's TelePresence high-definition IP product enabling face-to-face real-time meetings between colleagues and partners without the need to travel.

Showing the way, Moses said: ""If we can reduce one flight to Chicago and back, that will help us reduce our carbon emissions. These technologies really can help us cut costs, reduce air travel and reduce our overall carbon emissions."

TelePresence has been on the market for a year and there are 100 customers deploying it in over 40 countries. Charles Stucki, VP and GM of the TelePresence Systems business unit, said: "Cisco TelePresence is the fastest-growing new product category in Cisco history."