Vendors are pouring more green into their sales pitches, but their messages aren't reaching the right ears clearly. That's one of the findings in a Forrester report released today titled "Tapping Buyers' Growing Interest In Green IT." According to the study, 85% of respondents from the U.S. and 93% of those from Europe said that environmental concerns are "important" in planning IT operations. However, just 15% Vendors are pouring more green into their sales pitches, but their messages aren’t reaching the right ears clearly.That’s one of the findings in a Forrester report released today titled “Tapping Buyers’ Growing Interest In Green IT.” According to the study, 85% of respondents from the U.S. and 93% of those from Europe said that environmental concerns are “important” in planning IT operations. However, just 15% of respondents said that they have a high level of awareness of vendors’ green initiatives.“Vendor information about green characteristics is not moving up the chain of command to affect management decision-making. Maybe vendors should be revisiting their communication approaches,” the report quotes an anonymous IT worker in the insurance industry saying. The problem might not just be communication barriers, but also a problem with the message: The connection between going green and saving green isn’t clear, at least to those who are in charge of writing the checks: “Show the long-term or even short-term cost savings, and people will buy. When you start saving energy, you save cost, also. It’s win-win,” an anonymous IT work from the energy industry is quoted as saying in the Forrester report.Forrester Senior Vice President Christoper Mines, who authored the report, says that vendors’ salesfolks may have to lead the charge in getting their respective company’s green message across. “People like the corporate affairs types and lab types … are the ones who are talking this up. But think about [vendors’] main channel to their customer base: The sales force. That’s where the enterprises are going to get most of their information as to what the vendors are doing,” he says. The report also cites some misconceptions about sustainable IT, which vendors will need to erradicate. “Our interviewees clung to a number of old notions about computer operation, such as “It’s better to keep equipment running 24×7” or, more generally, “Green means more expensive.” (One fascinating nugget from the report, on that note: “HP did a 2006 internal audit of some 183,000 PC monitors and found that a third of them were not set for energy saving — presto, $600,000 in annual energy savings.”) The haziness surrounding vendors’ green pitches might explain why only a quarter of the companies Forrester surveyed said that “green criteria” were part of their IT purchasing decisions. That percentage is bound to increase, though, and not for reasons I find particularly surprising: “Looking a few years ahead, though, our interviewees expect green to hold more sway in their decision-making, pushed by growing public awareness of environmental issues, ,anticipated government regulation, and greater need for energy efficiency,” the report says. Forrester’s “Tapping Buyers’ Growing Interest In Green IT” report is available here for $279.Is your company clearly getting, or delivering, the message about going green? Technology Industry