Agile Development Blog

As part of our goal to have a zero carbon footprint by 2020, we calculate our total carbon footprint each year including building facilities, travel, commuting, IT and waste.  As we get more accurate every year, we are adding in the impact of using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to that calculation. I have been unable to find a benchmark of other SaaS companies carbon footprints, so I am putting out a call for SaaS companies to share their footprint per user.

Rally’s benchmark – 8 tons of CO2 per year for every 100 users

At Rally, we have been growing steadily (227% in 2005-2007, 242% in 2007-2009) at the same time working hard to limit our carbon footprint.  Unfortunately, as a company grows, its carbon footprint often grows with it.

We have been able to keep carbon per 100 users flat at 8 tons per year for the last two years – the same amount produced by a single person flying from New York to Deli, India round trip 4 times. In addition, we estimate that our SaaS customers are avoiding an additional 1 ton per year of CO2 as compared to running an application in a robust manner in their own data center.

What is your SaaS carbon footprint per 100 users?

Lacking any other information, I used our figure – 8 tons per 100 users per year – to calculate our carbon use per 100 SaaS seats for each of our SaaS suppliers including: Google Enterprise Apps, Salesforce Unlimited, NetSuite, Big Machines, Eloqua, Xactly, and Open Air.  I assume our numbers are conservative because we are not the scale of the Google or Salesforce, and we count airline miles and employee commute in our footprint.  Can any other SaaS providers tell me your carbon per 100 users to increase the accuracy of our calculations?

Like Salesforce, we buy renewable energy credits from NativeEnergy to offset the carbon of hosted operations.  This is a very small portion of our overall carbon footprint -  about 7 tons per quarter.  However, it does a couple of things for us: 1) It supports our SaaS service being carbon neutral since 2008,  2) It keeps us learning about carbon credits at a national and local level, and 3) most importantly, it keeps us focused on our goal of zero carbon by 2020.

Do you want to partner?

In addition to our efforts to battle climate change in our industry, we are also working hard in social responsibility by following the 1% model started by Marc Benioff and Suzanne DiBianca at SalesforceFoundation.org.  Last year, we hit our 1% target of volunteer time with over 2,500 hours helping 90 charities.  This year, we are in search for a strategic non-profit partner to help us focus our corporate social responsibility efforts and volunteer time in one of three areas:

1. Reducing the environmental burden from the IT industry (carbon, e-waste, toxins, take-back efforts)
2. Decreasing the digital divide in society (universal access to the Internet)
3. Increasing the level and engagement in corporate social responsibility behaviors

If your non-profit believes it can leverage the 3000+ volunteer hours from a company in Colorado, North Carolina and the UK to help on one of these efforts, please contact us.  We are looking for a true partner who wants to start developing a relationship in 2009.

The importance of sustainability at Rally

Our efforts are based on trying to stand on the shoulders of Ray Anderson from Interface. See Ray’s Fortune interview on pushing through on sustainability in light of the current economic crisis that is radically affecting his commercial carpet business.  Since then, Google’s efforts and Salesforce’s efforts in the SaaS IT space have kept us moving forward.

We look forward to driving zero footprint data centers, increasing remote collaboration technology and having a zero footprint campus in the next decade. We are preparing a sustainability report for 2008, following the Global Reporting Initiative format.  It is not a small project, but it was the clear next step for our sustainability efforts that started in earnest in 2007.  Our goal is to release it by July 1st so stay tuned.

ADDED After Publishing and based on comments:

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

Graphic below to provide clear breakdown on sources of Carbon in our business – 6/17/09

On our recent webinar “Demystifying Cloud, The Next Generation Architecture” we had a number of thoughtful and tough questions related to security, intellectual property and risks. We provided answers to these questions in the recording, but I found the recent SD Times article “Cloud Providers Answer Tough Questions” an even better source. In this article, a number of experts on specific platforms from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce as well as Rally’s own Zach Nies answer questions about security, lock-in and IP.

Henry Ford didn't foresee the impact of the first car - do we foresee the true impact of the Cloud?

Daryl Plummer from Gartner also did a great job recently describing the real point of cloud computing as he reviews Russ Daniels recent Forbes article. Russ says:

“In my view, the ability to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship in this new model is one of the most promising ways to ignite the next wave of economic growth. We can no more see the full impact of the cloud than Henry Ford foresaw the impact of his desire to produce more cars in less time.”

As a result of SD Times’ tough questions and our desire to “ignite the next wave of economic growth,” we decided to talk in our next webinar with Global Logic and IBM about how to go to the cloud and mitigate risk along the way. As with any pilot, the goal is to enter wisely, learn fast and then move forward.  Given the iterative and incremental method of Agile is best suited for this fast-learning approach, we will title our next talk “Going to the Cloud – the Agile Way.”

We are structuring the content now, but I would love to hear your ideas, questions or feedback on this topic. I will also post a registration link for the webinar as soon as I have it.

Thesis: Taking a learning-first approach to your cloud efforts can help you avoid the risks of vendor lock-in, IP security and a spectacular failure

Proposed Agenda:

1. Review the innovation, benefits and risks
2. Typical approach – Choosing early, over selling, dramatic big bang
3. The Agile/Lean approach – Set-based, scientific and learning-based
4. Case study
5. Close

The Dream of the Cloud by Enrica Bressan

What is your dream for the cloud? 

Is it a blob that will cause you to lose all control, including your job?

Or, is it an amazing innovation that will save your company from this world-wide recession?

Or the it's The Blob - Buy the classic @ Turner by clicking image

On April 15th, I will be fortunate enough to join Sachin Saxena from Global Logic and Mac Devine, the AIM SaaS/Cloud CTO at IBM,  for a webinar to attempt to answer these questions (learn more and register here).  They are both experts in internet technology and hold deep knowledge (along with beautiful slides) on the topic of cloud computing.  Their goal is to help you understand the massive energy, time and computer savings made possible by the many cloud options.

Specifically,  they will define the cloud, its opportunities and roadblocks. They both plan to highlight case studies, and my role will be as a customer and extensive user of cloud solutions.  This is much the same role that I played at the New Jersey CIO summit in February.  (If you can’t wait for the webinar – don’t miss Troy Angrignon’s opinion post at Sandhill.com about the implications on cloud computing on software firms.)

At Rally, we are very comfortable with the application of these technologies.  As a 160 person SaaS firm provider, we have been in the early market for many of these technologies.  It was fun for us to benefit from the fast move to free of hypervisor/virtualization portion of this wave. Listen to Mike Cote’s podcast on the topic at RedMonk. He has been covering the Cloud/virtualization for years as an open source analyst.

As a result, I believe that 100% of the companies who attend this webinar will leverage these technologies in 2009 in a strategy to reduce risk and cut costs.  But what are the other rationales for the cloud?  What are your stories?  I think cloud/SaaS, Agile development and web 2.0 customer communities are an even bigger story, but one that will take longer to develop than the use of public/private clouds and virtualization technology.

Next up on this topic will be the actual energy savings reports from our virtualization and power management efforts lead by our internal green team.

This Friday, February 27th, I will be speaking on a panel at the New Jersey Technology Council’s 2009 CIO Conference called “Moving to a Virtual World” ( www.njtc.org). The panel is on Cloud Computing and it is a mixed collection of vendors and CIO’s talking about the rapid arrival, the clear benefits and struggles of adopting Cloud Computing.

At Rally, we have gained some firsthand knowledge of these technologies, platforms and applications as we try to find the most energy efficient, stable and cost effective solutions for us and our customers.  As a small fast growing technology company, we are an ideal customer for Cloud Computing and I am sitting on this panel as a user, supplier and leader on software development for the cloud.  (We use Amazon EC2, VMWare ESX, Salesforce and seven App-Exchange Apps, Google Apps Premier to run our business and manage our own multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS application in the cloud.)

In preparation for the panel, I was brushing up on some of the latest news and views on this topic.

Here are the worthwhile Cloud Computing links that I used to prepare my talking points:

• Cloud Computing – you have to start on Wikipedia to make sure your definition is grounded
• What is Cloud Computing - a wonderful video of a variety of folks from the Web 2.0 Expo
• Above the Clouds – is a new blog site, whitepaper and video from Cal Berkley Professors on Cloud Computing
• Cloud an Outsourcing Option in Troubled Times – CIO Insight article on using cloud services instead of more traditional IT outsourcing options (both development and operations)
• “What the hell is Cloud Computing?” - Larry Ellison rails on the whole idea as over-blown (see many YouTube videos)

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