Comments on: What is Your SaaS Carbon Footprint?

By: SaaS

SaaS — Wed, 18 May 2011 21:27:25 +0000

Carbon footprint is becoming a big deal. At Surge we don’t sit in an office like others. Most of our people are contractors from all over the US so it is more difficult to figure ours. There are only a basic core group that ever travels and because we telecommute we have no travel to and from work. It looks as though we are a pretty green company but there is always more that we can do. Thanks for the post.

By: SaaS

SaaS — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:48:55 +0000

This is certainly becoming more of an issue. Looking at the graph you posted it would seem to me that the biggest factor is electricity. Electricity is kind of important in the SaaS model. How can we decrease our dependance on electricity? I wonder how many companies are using alternate power for electricity? Thanks for the post.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:04:41 +0000

Back in 2008 we did an assessment of our own carbon footprint in the context of using a web collaboration solution to reduce the need for air travel and local commuting.

http://www.catalystresources.com/saas-blog/going_green_using_saas_and_rias/

By: Planting Green Agile Seeds | Scrumology

Planting Green Agile Seeds | Scrumology — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:07:44 +0000

[...] of the benefits of the SaaS movement is the increased availability of multi tenant services with a reduced the carbon footprint. There is a good chance the software you are building is web enabled in some fashion, so take time [...]

By: Ryan Martens

Ryan Martens — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:17:18 +0000

David,

I have not modeled this but, I makes “back of the napkin” sense. As a multi-tenant solution, we don’t not have multiple instances of app or db (beyond horizontal clustering/sharding) layers floating around on multiple boxes. So, yes that should be much more efficient. However, simplicity of architecture really saves in maintenance, support, upgrade and patching and delivers much higher reliability, availability, security, and performance.

By: David Bland

David Bland — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:53:06 +0000

I imagine true multi tenant SaaS applications are better on the C02 footprint than fake-SaaS applications that spin up extra VM’s, instances, etc per tenant.

By: David Koontz

David Koontz — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:28:18 +0000

A better video of Ray Anderson is his speech at TED in 2009, it gives more background, and more data.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_anderson_on_the_business_logic_of_sustainability.html

By: Ryan Martens

Ryan Martens — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:37:37 +0000

I added the graphic that shows the carbon break down at the bottom of the post. I hope this helps?

By: Scott Jackson

Scott Jackson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:02:45 +0000

It would be interesting to know what current factor is the biggest contributor to your carbon footprint and what was the change you made that had the biggest impact to your footprint.

By: Dr. James Brancheau

Dr. James Brancheau — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:07:35 +0000

Kudos to Rally. You are doing all the right things for the right reasons. It is inspiring to see a high-growth company tracking and managing the key issues in business sustainability: financial, social, and environmental. Too many growth companies don’t make time for building long-term foundations for sustainability. Thanks for setting a great example for the industry.