At commonIT we’re committed to sustainable development, but the question is “does Virtual Browser contribute to Green IT?”

Well, to begin with we can consider that anything that contributes to the development of (1) working from home or remotely and (2) application centralization (virtualization, cloud computing) participates indirectly in energy savings by limiting unecessary travel and reducing server power consumption (according to VMWare, clustering 10 servers on a ingle virtual server platform reduces total power consumption by 80 to 90%). The agility and security that Virtual Browser provides for corporate (and mobile) use of web applications will help firms keep moving in the right direction.

But the most natural link between Virtual Browser and Green IT is probably the opportunity that our product represents for Netbooks. The development of these cheap and “green” terminals (see what Gartner says) is currently limited by the hardware performance required by the web browser. Today’s Netbooks don’t have the performance for more complex web applications. Virtual Browser can solve this problem, because the browser does not run on the terminal (or the Netbook) but on a virtual server in the infrastructure (or in the DMZ, or in the cloud). Only a very simple software agent (able to run on a USB key) runs on the laptop or the Netbook.