eWaste policy in action

In 2013, Workday committed to a "100% no landfill policy" and we have been actively implementing this program in the last year. For example, across 4 different data centers and office locations we have conducted six hard drive collections for data destruction, shredding and recycling of materials. This accounted for a total of almost 3,000 disk drives. Similarly, over 370 units of obsolete computing equipment were collected, cleansed and made ready for resell. Recycling can even be profitable on recovery value if done right!

Workday is committed to this program on a global scale and we are extending our coverage going forward. This will ensure that we are doing our best to minimize any negative impact on the environment as outlined in our sustainability commitment.

Workday ranked fifth biggest user of Green Power amongst technology companies

In a recent Bloomberg study, Workday was ranked the fifth largest consumer of Green Power (by percentage) amongst its peer group of technology companies. Led by giants such as Lenovo, Microsoft or SAP, this list also differentiates between companies producing clean energy themselves (such as Apple or Adobe) and other using RECs or other clean energy products to achieve their goals. Strangely missing from this list are companies like Google (major player in clean energy), Amazon (getting there) and Salesforce (recently also commitment to clean energy).

This is exciting validation that our efforts to be a 100% green powered cloud player are recognized and our CSR report is used as a source for such information.

Apple secretly builds out massive clean power facilities

While Google has over the years invested over a billion dollars in renewable energy projects and is a very public force-for-good in this sector, Apple has so far not made any visible moves to cleanly source the energy needs of its data centers. This is now changing. Over the last several years, Apple has built up two massive solar farms in North Caroline next to their newly build data center. Build by SunPower, these 20 MW solar farms plus their new 10 MW Bloom Energy fuel cell farm produce more energy than they consume in total.

The extent of the investment is staggering and it begins an era where large internet companies are actively playing in the energy market and changing the landscape of it in the process. Amazon is even building its own substations now and has engineers re-write old code to increase energy efficiency. At this scale, it makes sense. Very interesting moves by the big players...

Google expands purchase of green power in Africa and Europe

In two separate deals in the last two weeks, Google has increased its investment in green power to source its vast electricity needs for data centers. 

After signing a 10-year deal with a South-african solar power plant, they closed also a 10-year deal with a Swedish onshore windfarm (72 megawatts) to power their Finnish data center. The best thing about this is that they specifically looked for a net new green energy opportunity to ensure their funding would add additional positive impact rather than purchasing from existing sources. This engagement secured the funding to even begin with the wind farm.

This adds to their existing $1bn portfolio of green energy investments. Well done, Google!

Greenpeace pranks Amazon to be green

Greenpeace has begun to look into the clean energy reality of some of the largest IT companies with their "Clean the Cloud" initiative and recently published a clean cloud report. To improve their carbon footprint, they also successfully applied pressure to Facebook with their "No more coal" campaign and authored this amusing video. Facebook has since responded with a new commitment to clean energy and located their most recent data center in Sweden.

In the last week Greenpeace has also pranked Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is running a tremendous amount of hardware in the cloud. Some estimates say it is up to 500,000 servers.  But what are these servers powered by? In order to start the conversation Greenpeace put up a "green AWS" website falsely claiming clean powered services. The background is an interesting comparison: The big players have different levels of transparency, commitment and actual reality of renewable energy.

While Workday is nowhere near the size of the big players in terms of server count, it is good to know that we have a 100% clean power commitment through the purchase of RECs. While Greenpeace cites numerous more directly impactful options, our current use of colocation providers and the comparatively smaller number of servers makes RECs for now the best available option to mitigate emissions.

Cloud Computing and Sustainability: Beyond energy and into ethics

BSR recently wrote an article on the sustainability impacts of cloud computing beyond the usual topic of energy/carbon reduction that instead delves into energy policy, human rights, and data privacy.

It is interesting to note that in the context of cloud computing, human rights doesn't necessarily equate to labor practices, but rather data privacy and protection of data by cloud service providers. This, of course, is an area that Workday takes very seriously.

They end with this note, which challenges cloud providers to broaden the scope of what is typically considered corporate responsibility:

"As cloud computing takes hold and changes the profile of business, so too will it change notions of business ethics and corporate responsibility. There was once a time when business would argue that suppliers should take sole responsibility for following labor and environmental laws, yet today we see armies of auditors and labor relations specialists going above and beyond what is legally required. A similar transition will arise with cloud computing, and activities deemed outside the scope of corporate responsibility today -- challenging unreasonable law enforcement demands and meddling in energy policy -- will be mainstream tomorrow. Now is the time for today’s most innovative companies to define what that looks like in practice."

Google ends RE <C

In a recent announcement of out-of-season spring cleaning (EOL for Google projects that didn't play out as planned), Google decided to end their efforts to make the production of Renewable Energy more cost efficient than Coal (RE < C). This ambitious initiative ran for four years and results on solar thermal (heliostat) and geothermal energy are published and broadly available.

Stopping this project does not mean Google abandons their attention to green energy. They continue to invest heavily in Renewable Energy (more than $850 million) and also are leading on Data Center efficiency. However, some doubts remains about their future direction as Bill Weihl, google.org's Green Czar and driving force behind many initiatives,  has decided to leave the company in November 2011.

Google's efficient data centers

Google operates lots of data centers around the globe and they are definitely leading the way when it comes to data center efficiency. As part of that, they measure and openly publish the efficiency of their data centers using the "Power Usage Efficiency" or PUE metrics. PUE measures what percentage of energy drawn from the grid is used not for powering actual servers, but for overhead such as cooling. The average PUE in US data centers is 2.0, according to an EPA study. Google operates a 12-month trailing PUE of 1.14! Take a look at their data center efficiency page to see the details. They break down their strategy for efficiency in 5 best practices:

• Measure PUE
• Manage Air Flow
• Adjust Thermostat (run hotter)
• Use Free Cooling (ambient cooling)
• Optimize power distribution

They also recommend the GreenGrid standards for measuring PUE, which is an interesting set of guidelines to consider.

Given that Workday is sharing data centers with other tenants (co-location), we don't have the same degree of choice, but we are working with our data center providers to understand their respective PUE as well as the energy mix going into powering the data center. This gives us a good understanding of how "green" a data center is in the end.

CDP Study Shows Cloud Computing Saves Green AND Is Green

The Carbon Disclosure Project recently released a study that provides some interesting numbers on the sustainability of utilizing cloud computing (both economically and environmentally). The study was conducting using 11 global firms as case studies, including two Workday customers: Aviva and Applied Materials.

Key findings:

• Cloud computing can avoid millions of metric tons of CO2
• Potential financial benefits from cloud computing run into $ billions
• Cloud computing delivers a postive net present value (NPV)
  
• Cloud computing brings business efficiency savings

To illustrate, they build a hypothetical scenario of a large global firm moving their HR application to the public cloud (e.g. Workday HCM). They found that this would save $12 million over five years and cut CO2 emissions by 30,000 metric tons - the equivalent of taking 5,900 cars off the road for a year!

The overall results show that by 2020, "large U.S. companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil – enough to power 5.7 million cars for one year."

This is great news for Workday customers and confirms what we've known for a while now: SaaS Is Green!

Open Compute

Facebook has taken the concept of open source software development and brought it to the hardware domain. They goal was to built a new type of server which less expensive to build and much more efficient to operate. They challenged every assumption and built a new, "beautiful" server. It is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to operate a data center built to run these servers over conventional data center / server architectures. Very impressive.

And the best part, they give it to the community for everyone to copy, learn from and evolve. Way to go Facebook!

Take a look:

Carbon Accounting - an opportunity for Workday?

In a recent InfoWorld article, the crucial role of IT in the solving the climate crisis is described in two dimensions:
* measuring CO2 emissions
* reducing the carbon footprint of enterprises

With a cap-and-trade agreement drawing closer and closer, the need to measure the emissions is very clear. Lots of companies will look for ways to comply to the new regulations and an assessment of their current footprint will become an immediate requirement. Several companies are starting to offer solutions already. Some might be rudimentary, but the concept is there. Note that several of these companies are already in the Workday eco-system:
* ILOG (our Flex graphics provider)
* Rackspace (our online email provider)
* Microsoft (strategic partner)

More comprehensive solutions are being worked on by interesting startups such as Greenstone.

The reduction of CO2 emissions of an enterprise can be accomplished in a wide variety of ways. The SaaS delivery model with its highly efficient hosting environments provides a good way to reduce IT-based emmissions. Workday plays a very positive role in this dimension already. Our customers can turn off their on-premise servers and rely on our data centers. Carbon offsets for our energy consumption could complete the footprint reduction for our customers.

But how about the measurement dimension? Workday already is the system of record for all accounting activity, why not carbon accounting? Could integration to upcoming hosted carbon-measurement systems make a difference? Is there a strategic opportunity for us to pursue?

The Microsoft environmental dashboard extension is an interesting data point. Warren Wilson, research director with London-based market researcher Ovum, said other major ERP vendors, including SAP and Oracle, as well as smaller players are building a range of tools to measure carbon emissions. I had a phone call with Warren about 9 months ago where was inquiring about Workday's interest in this topic. I believe our interest could be sparked by the increasing market demand.

Green Predictions 2009

InfoWorld's Ted Samson has asked 10 industry IT leaders for their predictions for 2009. Will the economic downturn kill green initiatives? Or will the energy savings drive more initiatives? What will happen in Green data centers?

My favorite was by Microsoft: "What are best practices to reduce energy and computational resource consumption for application design? Sloppy code is wasteful. Not only is it slow, error prone, and often not extensible, it usually wastes energy and utilizes unnecessary computational resources. This has a significantly negative impact on the environment. However, most architects are given the "virtualize the problem away" answer for environmental sustainability."

So let's build the most efficient apps we can and be green. :-)

Also noteworthy:
* AMD predicts the start of carbon budgets to prepare for coming regulations.
* Forrester thinks energy savings will shift from data center focus to all distributed PCs (think Energy Star 5.0)
* Cisco calls cloud computing the next green killer app and Microsoft predicts cloud providers will report environmental metrics and provide concrete green operational level agreements for enterprises

The business case for greener IT

At Workday Rising, our platinum sponsor Accenture distributed their "Outlook" magazine and it had an interesting article titled "The business case for a greener IT agenda" in it. It outlines that while green efforts are not quite mainstream and fully regulated, they become more and more prevalent, especially in the IT departments. The CIO as eco-champion can drive 5 focal points:
* Don't let up on the data center: Lots of savings to be had here
* Foster green work practices: Anything from telecommuting to duplex printing to turning off the monitors help
* Rewire the office: Use VoiP, be smart about your infrastructure
* Purchase with green intent: Choose the right vendors and products
* Elevate corporate citizenship: Work with your communities on hardware donations and recycling

Finally, Accenture predicts more and more CIOs will be asked for green initiatives so it's better to be prepared!

At Workday, our very own Jim Hopp is definitely an eco-champion. We are on top of the data center efficiency, encourage green employee behavior, purchase energy-efficient laptops and servers (see also our Climate Savers commitment). We should be relentless in our pursuit to be a sustainable green SaaS vendor - it is and will be even more so a strong value-add!

100% solar powered hosting provider...and other ideas

In a recent "innovation report", the environmental defense fund (climate411) shows an example of how business can be innovative and green. They provide a case study on how AISO offers hosting 100% powered by solar energy onsite. The report also offers many other ideas that go beyond must-do duplex-printing and CFLs...check it out!

Aplicor's view on green SaaS

Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Aplicor (another SaaS ERP provider, mainly known for CRM), has posted a good article on what makes SaaS green and what concrete steps can be taken to improve efficiency of data center operations.

http://blog.aplicor.com/071001.htm

He quotes a 2007 APC study whereby only about 30% of data ceneter energy consumption goes into servers, the rest is infrasturcutre to keep stuff running. But there are many other interesting details in his post, so go take a look.

Green IT numbers

In a recent report on Green IT, McKinsey surveyed data center usage and expected growth in the next years (download the full report for free here).

More efficient hardware, optimized racking and virtualization can do a lot to cut down in inefficient hardware use that is prevalent today. Still, CO2 emissions from data centers are projected to go up fourfold by 2020!

While Workday certainly has an already very efficient use of our data centers, our current customers might see us as an opportunity to reduce their energy costs more rapidly and cost effective. In the end, SaaS is green!

Workday's Green Commitment

With the launch of our new website today, we also have a page outlining the commitment Workday makes to being green:

http://www.workday.com/company/the_workday_experience/green_commitment.php

Efficiently cooling and powering big data centers

Here is an interesting talk from Margie Backaus, Chief Business Office at Equinix, on how to build and manage large scale data centers. For every watt consumed by servers, a watt is needed for cooling. The design of data centers makes a dramatic impact on how cooling can be done and electricity saved.

http://www.networkworld.com/podcasts/panorama/2007/060707pan-equinix.html

Unfortunately, alternative energy sources are not (yet) considered a viable solution. But carbon offsets can address that.

Completely Green Web Host

Looking for a personal webhosting service? You might want to consider this provider in your shortlist. They run their facility totally on solar power.. not RECs or Carbon Offsets.

Read about their operation at: http://www.greenesthost.com/about.php

Green IT projects save money

Green projects are often criticized for being only feel-good and not financially viable. Especially in times of economic downturn this fallacy is frequently quoted. If done right, green initiatives in IT and other parts of the enterprise can save money and directly and positively affect the bottom line.

Read this InfoWorld article for examples of desktop power-management, virtualization, print management and refurbishing machines.