You don’t buy software, you license it. This means that usually once a year or so and certainly with every upgrade you need to relicense or renew your agreement.  A license also means you don’t get to sue the vendor if your software causes your business to crash.  In any case, treat your license for software like motor vehicle insurance. Have your driving habits changed, do you have fewer vehicles on the road? You can save money by reading your license and asking for changes rather than just writing a check.

1.  Turn off your computers, monitors and printers. This sounds like common sense but the vendors have not made this easy. If you are a small company you can do this with a powerstrip. Users won’t use powerstrips? Try this. Have the boss walk around with two types of stickies in the evening. One stickie says thanks for turning off the computer and one says hey you forgot to shut the thing down. You’ll be surprised how fast this helps. If you want you can buy those automatic on and off switches to turn things off. This may not be great for computers that get shut down this way.

2. Make it a pain to print stuff. Remember when you used to have to print to a central printer? What a pain. Renew this practice and you’ll see  a rapid drop off in printer usage and supply costs.

3. Have a plan to let employees work at home one day a week. This may not sound easy, but you’ll get happier employees and if you can shut the place down one day a week, there is a lot of money to be saved

Videoconferencing is one of those technologies that always seemed destined for the future. No more, videoconferencing when used correctly can accomplish the business mission and also save your company money.

I did a video commentary for eWeek from Newport recently while I was down there attending the annual APC editorial confab. The lead story in the Providence Journal was about $4 gas and accompanying articles were about the rising costs of food and nearly everything else in our petro-based economy.

The point I made in the commentary was as the U.S. economy suffers from continually rising costs and consumers are worried about their homes, the U.S. high tech companies strike me as particularly out of touch. Do consumers really care if Microsoft buys Yahoo when they are worried about making the mortgage payment. And although I didn’t attend Walt Mossberg’s All Things Digital conference, the news reports and video footage I viewed was mostly about yes, Microsoft becoming a media company, phones of all shapes sizes and networks and a world divorced (in my opinion) from economic and social reality.

So, I was happy to sit for a morning listening to presentations on data centers, power usage and ways companies can cut their electrical consumption ranging from simple steps to fully instrumented projects. APC, which was acquired in 2006 by Paris-based Schneider Electric, is what I define as a real company. Real companies help you evaluate how your company runs and then tries to sell you some stuff to make your business run more efficiently. There is not a lot of mystery in real companies. No one is trying to figure out how they will ever earn revenues. You don’t have to come up with some mythical ROI formula to justify the investment.

Say your company spends $250K a year in powering, heating and cooling your IT data center. Changing the rack structure, altering the cool air flow and fidgeting with the temperature might cut that in half. You might have to spend $250k to get that savings. Good idea? Bad idea? Depends on how long you will be at your site, how much you believe in the promises of cloud, hosted computing and are you willing to trade off ongoing service costs for capital investment. Like, I said, no magic just good old fashioned number crunching.

Let’s hear it for the real companies.