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Less than a year after its $350,000 marketing campaign failed and its stream of new business vanished, Analysys took a risk by overhauling its business model.

"Last September, the bottom fell out," said Stephen V. Kolbe, president and founder of the 15-year-old information technology company.

The Baltimore company's practice of picking up new clients by marketing itself on major search engines like Google had stopped producing new accounts as the recession deepened.

Determined to maintain the company's record of never downsizing, Kolbe began searching for ways to cut costs and generate new business. He found his revitalization recipe through a combination of adopting green IT, "virtualizing" its server farm and embracing the new IT trend of cloud computing.

Since then, Analysys has realized sales growth of more than 5 percent and shaved thousands of dollars from its energy bills.

Green IT "is the one unique practice where you can do something really amazing for the environment and also create great benefits for yourself," Kolbe said.

Analysys installed technology to automatically shut down work stations at its Baltimore and Bethesda offices at the end of each day.

It also "virtualized" its server farm. Instead of maintaining a dedicated server for e-mail operations, another for Web functions and so on, Analysys distributed those functions across several servers. The change enabled the company to more fully utilize the capacity of each machine and shrink its hardware from 20 servers to four.

"The environmental costs around those systems are real big heavy hitters," Kolbe said. "Servers consume a lot of power. They also produce a lot of heat. The cooling system, the battery backups, all the technologies that operate in support of those servers add up to a lot of power consumption."

The green IT measures, Kolbe said, cut power consumption by 52 percent, and the company recouped its green IT investment in four months.

The company used some of the savings to become carbon neutral, specifically by switching its electricity supply to 100 percent wind power and offsetting its remaining carbon impact by buying renewable energy credits. The effort made Analysys the first Maryland IT company to be included in the Environmental Protection Agency's Green Power Partners list. It also left Analysys saving more than $13,000 a year on its energy bills.

At the same time, Analysys embraced cloud computing — a system that maintains all software programs, data and Internet functions on a remote server farm, or in a "cloud." The system frees users from having to maintain their own servers or purchase their own software. It also lets users access all their data and programs from any computer, mobile or thin client device.

"Microsoft sees the future as one in which cloud computing plays a pivotal role in all of our daily functions," said M.J. Murphy, business development manager for Microsoft's mid-Atlantic region. "And the way [Kolbe] is thinking about cloud computing really puts him on the bleeding edge of what you can do today."

Analysys has started offering clients, which often are small businesses, a cloud-computing service that supports all their business operations and all their staff for a fee as low as $250 a month.

By signing onto the service, for example, the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland were able to bolster service to its 55 employees and 40,000 members while eliminating its server operation, said CEO Traci Barnett. The switch spared the organization from a looming $7,000 investment in new air conditioning equipment for its server room and is expected to save about $16,000 a year in electricity costs.

Bob Everett, principal of Bottom Line Consulting, an accounting firm in Laurel, said his business operations used to depend on a hard drive he bought at Staples and his own efforts to create backups and provide security.

"But at the end of the day, it was just kind of a joke," Everett said.

Cloud computing, he said, proved affordable for his three-person company and provided him with full business computing operations.

"It's also extremely convenient to be at a client site and be able to open my laptop and pull up their file," he said. "That's pretty impressive to my clients."

Kolbe said cloud computing now accounts for 85 cents of every new dollar of his company's revenues.

"We weren't even doing this 12 months ago," he said. "It's amazing how transformative it has been."

Analysys, with 40 employees and sales of $4.3 million in the year ended June 30, plans to expand its work force by 10 percent this year and projects sales growth of 30 percent to 40 percent.