Analyst predicts green accounting in ERP software

This morning I had an analyst call with Warren Wilson from Ovum. Warren is asking two main questions:

1) How can the IT industry reduce its own carbon footprint (e.g., how much electricity is required to accomplish a given workload with a SaaS solution vs. an on-premise solution); and
2) To what extent can ERP software help the rest of the world reduce its carbon footprint (e.g. by collecting and analyzing energy-consumption data and then helping to manage it).

With regulations about carbon emissions on the horizon, how can companies track their current footprint? Currently there does not seem to be a solution out there that would support carbon accounting in manufacturing, facility or fleet management or other areas. While this is not any of the areas Workday will go into anytime soon, it is still noteworthy that there is an opportunity for software that support this.

Of course, we also talked about "SaaS is green" and Warren supports the statement that centralized, efficient processing in green datacenter (with offsets) is a strong case.