In recent weeks, for instance, you’ve seen Kaseya, N-able and Level Platforms all talk about green IT strategies on this site.

Some of the Kaseya and N-able perspectives are above (from Dan and Rob, respectively). And you can find the Level Platforms perspective here. Each vendor brings a unique strategy to the green movement. But they still find time to engage in debate/discussion with one another. Which is great.

For the managed services market to grow and thrive, we need more of this cross-company dialog.

When the PC market was growing up, Gates and Jobs put aside their differences long enough to share the stage for some major moments in IT history.

Similar moments are now occurring in the managed services industry. During the N-able conference last month in Dallas, it was great to see rivals like Autotask, ConnectWise and Tigerpaw on the same stage, describing the PSA (professional services automation) market.

We hope to see similar “moments” in MSP history occurring through vendor-driven organizations like MSP Partners and through MSP- and channel-focused associations like MSPAlliance and CompTIA.

And we hope to see the competitive — and cooperative — dialog continue here on MSPmentor.

I couldn’t agree more. There is plenty of opportunity here for MSP’s to show some technology leadership while promoting envrionmental stewardship. The great part of this is that it doesn’t cost the MSP or the customer money — it actually saves the customer money. What better “foot in the door” is there than showing a immediate cost savings?

This article outlines one product — there are many others out there that need to be explored. N-central with Remote Environment Manager from N-able Technologies (www.n-able.com) provides sophisticated power control capabilities including time of day based inactivity rules, as well as tools that will allow the MSP to power down systems remotely using Intel(r) vPro(tm) technologies. In addition, you can power them up automatically as part of an off hours maintenance program which improves power usage and MSP efficiency.

MSP’s have lots of options on how to best to use Green initatives in their operational as well as sales and marketing programs. The need to make sure the look beyond just the sponsored links.