With energy prices on the rise and global warming accelerating at an alarming rate, “going green” is no longer a fad. The telecom industry is serious about making changes, which is why conference producer iHollywood Forum opted to host the first-ever Communications Goes Green forum in conjunction with NXTcomm08.

“The theme of the forum is how the telecom industry can use its resources, both internal operations and external products and services, to help provide a more sustainable environmental strategy for the future,” said Zahava Stroud, president of iHollywood Forum.

Stroud says she hopes that 200 telecom industry executives will attend the conference. iHollywood’s first “green” forum, Hollywood Goes Green, sold out with 320 attendees in December. “What we find is that many companies are trying to develop a sustainability strategy, but it’s really overwhelming,” Stroud said. “With these conferences, we are trying to give them some practical tools to start with.”

At the conference, Dorothy Attwood senior vice president of public policy and chief privacy officer at AT&T, will deliver the morning keynote on why building a sustainable business is good business. The lunchtime keynote will be delivered by Kathryn Brown, senior vice president, public policy development and corporate responsibility, at Verizon, who will focus on how information technology can improve climate change.

“If you look at corporate citizenship today, one of the most important topics the public wants us to add is the environment,” said Chris Lloyd, executive director of public policy and corporate responsibility at Verizon. “They want to know what we are doing as a good corporate citizen to reduce our own carbon footprint and how we can help others. That’s what Kathryn will talk about.”

The forum will include sessions on creating a green network infrastructure, strategies to reduce carbon footprints in the telecom sector, data center challenges, building a sustainable supply chain, and environmental trends in consumer electronics. Redback Networks, an Ericsson company, is a silver sponsor of Communications Goes Green, while Fujitsu Computer Systems and consulting company Business Edge Solutions are bronze sponsors.

In a session on global warming and strategies to reduce carbon footprint, Laddie Suk, global partner, innovation and transformation solutions, at BusinessEdge Solutions, will discuss how telcos can use real-time energy management and monitoring techniques to save money and improve greenhouse gas emissions. Suk points to rebates that utility companies offer telcos and other large corporate customers for going green that often go unclaimed.

“PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) in California, for example, has $10 million set aside for rebates, but they have passed out zero,” Suk said. The problem is that most telcos don’t know about the rebates, and if they do know, they usually cannot prove how much energy they are saving because they don’t have real-time monitoring of energy consumption, he explained.

Richard McCormack, senior vice president of marketing at Fujitsu, will speak on a panel about green data center challenges. “One point I want to make is that it is critical for telcos to actively join initiatives like the Climate Savers Computing Initiative and The Green Grid, which focus specifically on data center issues,” McCormack said. “If these organizations are owned only by vendors, it becomes very self-serving.”

During his session, McCormack said he will also share information about initiatives Fujitsu has undertaken internally to reduce its own carbon footprint. For example, the company implemented a simple program last year called Eco2Cost, which encourages employees to submit ideas for how to conserve energy. In one instance, an employee wrote a memo to the rest of his team indicating that in order to conserve paper, he would no longer print an agenda for the team’s weekly meetings.

“If he had done that a year before the program was implemented, he would have had gotten a bunch of nasty e-mails,” McCormack said. “But Eco2Cost let him claim his actions for the program.”

Other speakers at the Communications Goes Green conference include: Ebrahim Abassi, senior vice president of operations at Redback Networks; Edna Conway, senior director, advanced compliance and social responsibility at Cisco Systems; Matt Heinz, senior director of marketing at Verdiem; Michael Patterson, senior thermal architect in the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel; and Elaine Weidman, director of corporate responsibility at Ericsson.

For more information visit, www.commgoesgreen.com.