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

In Boulder Colorado, it is a beautiful spring day to admire the great spaceship that we live on.  In November 2007, we started our efforts to “green” Rally and our industry.  Since that day we have made some great progress on what I imagine to be a long journey.  I wanted to thank the employees at Rally, the City of Boulder, EcoCycle, Xcel, Salesforce Earthforce, EFBay Area “Do One Thing” and Native Energy for helping us start are journey.

Like adopting Agile, the effort to go “green” needs to be taken iteratively and incrementally and is done more quickly with good advisers, see above and below.  Our goal of fueling the move of Rally and our entire IT Industry to a sustainable industry will take continuous improvement process for years to come.   Carbon Neutral as a company and ultimately as an industry clearly has to be the goal.  Based on the work we have done to benchmark our energy usage and logical/economic actions, it is obvious it is going to take years, innovations and incentives for us to even make reach the goals adopted by the City of Boulder – Kyoto. (10% less Carbon output of 1990 levels by 2012 or 20% reduction from 2006)

For that reason, we started in our incremental approach toward “green expert” slowly:

• November – December 2008 – Kick-off efforts
  • Committed to off-setting our carbon use from Hosted Operations with Wind credits – DONE with Native Energy Cool Watts.
  • Started our team and the brainstorming environment – DONE – Green Ideas Hive
  • Signed up with City of Boulder program to help us learn from others – DONE – BeClimate Smart Audit

• Q1 2008 – Organize the Team
  • Build a backlog of Green ideas and build a roadmap of efforts for Q2 – DONE Roadmap Q2
    • April Implement Composting – DONE with help of Western Disposal (composting services), EcoCycle (consulting services), EcoProducts (compostable products) and Corporate Express (recyclable and compostable office products).
    • May – Implement a commuting incentive plan
    • June – Implement a single stream recycling plan
  • Build a backlog of Green efforts for Q3 to be partially funded by savings done in Q2
    • potentials
      include power management software, new building build-out efforts,
      moving to an alternative energy data center, reducing the energy used
      by our servers.

Thank you for your help, let’s keep working together to be “green
experts.”  It is going to take all of us to counteract our effects.
(The US has 4% of world populations but contributes 22% to global
warming – stopglobalwarming.org.)

Please post any comments here.