The biggest European information technology fair went green this year. The problem was that there were not many people around to notice.

CeBIT 2008 was a slimmed-down, serious affair, cut back to six days from seven. Formerly sprawling exhibits were corralled into order by theme and publicity stunts were banished to the weekend, which now comes at the end of the show, not the middle.

The idea was to turn dwindling exhibitor and visitor interest into a virtue by using the lack of gadgety distractions to create a business-like arena where managers could get on with meeting, greeting and checking out the competition.

The result was an atmosphere free of the chaos of previous years but also devoid of the excitement, casting a feeling of desertion over the vast trade-fair site in this northern German city.

Most exhibitors who still come to CeBIT — this year there are 5,845 of them, down 5 percent from last year — use the show to explain unglamorous business-system products to potential clients.

Cisco was one of the few to bring up the problems that require these solutions as it introduced a new Internet router to help cope with an anticipated increase in monthly data sent over the Internet by 2011, when it is expected to reach the equivalent of 144 times all the printed matter in the world.

CeBIT organizers declared the theme of this year’s show to be the environment and built a “green village” to house companies peddling products intended to increase corporate energy efficiency and reduce toxic waste.

“CeBIT Goes Green — Big Time” was the main headline of CeBIT News, the official publication of the fair, on Wednesday, which recognized that “green IT” was a trend that was impossible to ignore as both energy costs and climate-altering carbon emissions soar.

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft…