The City University of New York (CUNY) is a GREEN leader of huge proportions! I listened in on a very energizing Webinar yesterday that consisted of a discussion – moderated by a representative of the Center for Digital Education – with Ron Spalter, Executive Director for the CUNY Task Force on Sustainability, and Tria Case, CUNY University Director of Sustainability.

CUNY enrolls 400,000 students and, with all of its 10,000 faculty members and employees included, has about 500,000 people moving through the campuses of its 23 colleges in New York City every day. CUNY occupies 29 million square feet of real estate and consumes 1% of the city’s entire energy load. The system is huge and, right now, it is embarking on changes that will make a huge impact on the environment. The goal is to reduce the institution’s carbon footprint by 30% by 2017.

From an IT perspective, CUNY is changing out all legacy systems and deploying Oracle/PeopleSoft as its base for gaining efficiencies and reducing energy usage. But that is only a small part of the plan. It’s comprehensive, with high participation across all campuses. From the sound of it, the initiative is extremely well orchestrated and no stone has been left unturned.

Check out the CUNY Web site to learn more. You may also be interested in checking out their October 30, 2008, Sustainability Conference. CUNY is committed to minimizing its ecological impact and investing the resources to “construct, retrofit and maintain more sustainable facilities,” and they want to share ideas to ensure success. In addition to the October 30 conference, CUNY is forming an advisory board consisting of a broad spectrum of industry leaders from financial services and utility companies, as well as the “new green industry.”

We’re impressed with this undertaking and wish CUNY the highest degree of success. The road to sustainability will certainly require a sustained effort, and it sounds like they have put the foundation in place to move their enormous and highly complex institution successfully along the path toward their vision. GO CUNY!

We celebrated our 10 year anniversary last week. That’s 10 action-packed orbits around the sun! In actual fact, we passed this milestone on February 28, 2008, but wanted to have the celebration in a month that offered better weather than is typical in late February in Chicago.

Over 300 people joined us on June 4 at the Adler Planetarium for an evening of networking, dancing and good cheer. The Galileo Room was filled to capacity with clients, partners, vendors – and our wonderful and talented employees and their spouses. The energy in the room was truly amazing.

A link to the video we developed for the event appears at the end of this entry. Whether you know Synch well or not, it provides a good way to gain a deepened sense of who we are as a company, and what we stand for.

Follow this link to our “Elevating Value” video. Follow this link to our 10th anniversary celebration picture gallery.