Sustainable IT: True, green IT started to bud just last year. But the growth was significant in that time. Enough, indeed, to warrant a look at its positive impact, namely in the form of innovative products and initiatives. “I’ve made a sincere effort to highlight green-tech projects of note over the past 12 months, but let’s face it: I’m but one man (by my most recent count), and there’s little doubt in my mind that many more organizations out there have wrapped up some excellent, innovative IT projects geared toward realizing their sustainability goals,” Ted Samson explains. With that, InfoWorld is introducing the Green 15 awards, our newest. “Through the end of February, we’ll be accepting nominations for, generically speaking, green-tech projects that were completed, or mostly completed, in 2007.” Bottom line: winners will be projects that leverage technology to measurably cut waste, reduce organizations’ negative impact on the environment, and/or promote sustainable business-technology practices. Sumbit nominations at the Green 15 FAQ page. Gripe Line: It’s a point proven, and quite aptly at that, by Adobe, Microsoft and Symantec, among others: corporate-wide licensing enforcement systems usually just cause trouble for customers and vendors alike. Add Business Objects to that list, Ed Foster maintains in Business Objects licensing tool doesn’t deliver. For the past few months one reader found that the BI vendor “has had massive problems with their ESD service.” That’s ESD, as in Enterprise Software Delivery licensing system. “Our group has had to delay testing and a roll-out of a product we’ve paid for and licensed to use simply because we couldn’t download what we needed to!” the reader wrote. What licensing lunacy have you encountered? Talkback via the above link, or in the comments section below. Columnist’s corner: Among the many new concepts and capabilities that Web 2.0 technologies bring is some confusion over the lines between enterprise and consumer software. “This is not quite the same as the consumerization of enterprise software,” Ephraim Schwartz explains in this installment of Reality Check. “But the shift to Web 2.0 applications goes beyond workers wanting the same kind of capabilities built into their business software as they have in their home applications.” For one, the popularity of Facebook has opened eyes of forward thinking corporate executives to untold possibilities. But, Schwartz asks, what does it mean? Where it will lead? And, ultimately, where will all this end? Tradeshow of the week: Highlights from CES. Technology Industry