The Uptime Institute has been one of the organizations at the forefront of the green IT movement, along with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Green Grid, vendors and other groups. One key challenge Uptime has been dealing with is how data centers can justify energy efficiency to the higher-ups, the executives, what Uptime and founder Ken Brill like to call the “C-suite” — that is, CEOs, CFOs, even CIOs.

At its conference last year, Uptime first tossed out the idea of giving awards to those companies that went green with their data centers. That idea is now the Green Enterprise IT Awards, which aims to applaud companies that have made their data centers energy efficient.

Brill said it’s a way to get more companies, in particular executives, to realize that this matters.

“The awards allow us to give them recognition from the bottom-up approach,” he said. “Then it challenges the rest of industry to ask, ‘Why aren’t we doing the same thing?’”

The deadline for applying for an award is March 15, and there are multiple categories: systems architecture, hardware asset utilization, energy-efficient hardware deployment, facilities site physical infrastructure overhead, and green IT beyond the data center. The awards will be announced at the group’s symposium this year, which is scheduled for the end of April in Orlando.