Saas as a sustainability play

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The other day I had a quickfire Twitter conversation with Tom Raftery, Greenmonk’s sustainability analyst. He was saying he’d not seen evidence of the impact of green data centres. I’m on the fence regarding the global warming stuff but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the obvious imperative to conserve resources. This is one of the big tech themes for 2009 as it seems every man and his dog want to proselytize their ‘green’ credentials. BASDA was quick to jump on the bandwagon with an initiative I think is a good example of a trade association looking for something to do and kinda half getting it right. I’m told to ‘watch this space.’

My difficulty is that while many talk, little of substance seems to be happening. I am for instance surprised that I’ve seen very little of substance coming out of the professional bodies. Perhaps I’m missing something. Instead, I’ve seen plenty of statements of intent and grand gestures. That changed when I saw the Netsuite press release on what it has achieved for customers:

• With more than 6,000 customer companies sharing datacenter resources, NetSuite’s platform saved more than $61 million in energy bills per year
• These savings amount to nearly 595 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually, the equivalent of nearly 423,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year
• This is equivalent to nearly 1 million barrels of oil or the average electricity consumption of 56,000 homes per year.

I’m not a fan of press releases but on this occasion, the company confirmed that an external provider had assessed the impact, not Netsuite itself. In this fluid situation where standards (other than GRI) have not emerged, we need independent verification so that for me is a definite tick in the box:

“The EcoMetrics scorecard measured and outlined previously undefined NetSuite SaaS green benefits,” says Greenspace CEO Jason Howard. “NetSuite can now fully disclose its sustainability impact and goals, as well as the cloud platform functionality.”

So why do we need BASDA muscling in when there are already companies out there doing this ‘stuff’ from a position of understanding? I”ll wait and see but slapping a logo on your site for making a commitment is meaningless.

Of course the Netsuite PR gets padded out with supportive statements culled from customers and you can take that with a pinch of salt if you wish. But it is intriguing that companies conscious of the sustainability issue are prepared to make software decisions based on these types of metric. That is something we’ve not seen in the past.

The question for professionals is simple: would you recommend a client move to a saas solution as part of a commitment to sustainability? If not, then why not? Would you consider saas as an alternative to what you already use?

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Tagged as: Climate change, Climate Change Skeptics, Global warming, Tom Raftery