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:
Reducing the environmental burden from the IT industry (carbon, e-waste, toxins, take-back efforts)
Decreasing the digital divide in society (universal access to the Internet)
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
I know what you are thinking with the title of this post – I am drinking the Kool-Aid. Just bear with me for a minute. Back in 2002, when I started working on Rally, it was originally known as F4 Technologies. It was known as F4 because I did not want to work on anything that did not have the potential impact of a Factor of Four, for example a 4X increase in productivity or effectiveness. There are two reasons for this:
According to Paul Hawken in Natural Capitalism, we need a 4X productivity increase in the use of natural resources to get to a sustainable place with the current population in the world. Chapter 7 of that book helped form the core purpose and mantra of Rally – “Muda, Service and Flow.”
Now seven years into Rally, we have the proof that teams – including large and distributed teams – can be 4 to 10X more productive by following Lean principles and effectively implementing Agile development. Like the story of “Good to Great” from Jim Collins, you can’t leap here, but you can put yourself on that path by adopting a continuous improvement approach like Agile. If you do that, you can be a “great” software development organization that dominates your market and is 10X better than the good ones. Great organizations that dominate in their industry also have the knowledge and resources to change world, a la Google.org, the Salesforce.com Foundation and or through my favorite the Entrepreneur’s Foundation.
If you are working toward this, I believe you increase your business value by 4 to 10 times. I am going to make the case with the help of ROI models from David Anderson. (BTW, I love his book – it does a great job explaining the simple physics of Agile.)
From Chapter 2 - David Anderson's "Agile Management for Software Engineering"
This is a very simple model of software process. David shows more complex ones that model all the loop backs of large shipping software, but let’s work with this one. So, the rough equations to calculate the business benefit of the process are the following:
Net Profit = Throughput – Operating Expense
ROI = Net Profit / Investment
In the following four pages, I am going to look at how this equation plays out for four different scenarios:
Beginning Agile team in Flow benefiting from the 25% productivity savings of an Agile teams in the same study
Intermediate Agile team in Pull with incremental releases of value
Advanced team in Innovate that cuts time-to-market in 1/2 to end early after delivering 50% of the work but 80%the value
What you will see in this hypothetical modeling exercise is the true power of Agile to dramatically impact the software development teams in the organization. For a deeper understanding of what I mean by Flow, Pull and Innovate, please Jean and I’s white paper on moving to Program Pull.
Here is the summary:
Good waterfall team – ROI – 0.8
Beginning Agile team in Flow – ROI – 1.4 (1.6 factor better than good waterfall team)
Intermediate Agile team in Pull – ROI – 2.6 (3.2 factor better than good waterfall team)
Advanced Agile team in Innovate – ROI – 6.3 (7.7 factor better than good waterfall team)
Factor or Four or better – that is why there is such a rush towards Agile development. Of course, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Moving up this maturity curve takes long-term dedication to increasing discipline and agility across the entire organization, but there are dramatic benefits if you can get on the continuous improvement path and stay there.
As you may know, I am very passionate about the concepts of sustainability. For my birthday this year, my thoughtful wife and son gave me a living example of sustainability that sits on my desk and reminds me to work on this topic everyday. It is called an EcoSphere and I got it from EcoProducts Home Store here in Boulder (they are folks who also provide all of our compostables that help us approach zero waste here at Rally – they are a great Boulder success story).
The Ecosphere is a completely closed world and is self-sustainable. It was developed by two NASA scientists (the late Dr. Joe Hanson and the late Dr. Clair Folsome) trying to create models for long-term space flight. In it you will find algae, shrimp and bacteria living in a closed cycle with sun light as energy. (Learn more about EcoSphere’s sustainable model on their site.)
At $125 for a small sphere they are a bit pricey, but they are fun to watch, people always notice the shrimp moving around on my desk. After attending Thomas Friedman’s talk on “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” I realize they are just another part of my “work in progress” to living sustainably in the U.S. These do not feed me like my chickens and goats, but they also do not eat like my dogs and cats.
Here is mine on my desk - cool eh?
Definitely the most common question is: “Are those sea monkeys?“ According to the web site, they live 2 to 7 years with really no maintenance and NO they are not sea monkey branded brine shrimp.
This EcoSphere keeps me focused on the long road of continuous improvement needed to make our industry a zero carbon footprint or sustainable industry. We are currently on the road to be a larger emitter of CO2 than the airline industry by 2020.
We have to find the innovations in infrastructure, the methods and tools to reverse this. My of view of how to reverse this behavior is through the emerging software value cycle that is made possible by SaaS/Clouds, Agile development and Web 2.0 customer communities. You can read my thoughts on these topics or hear a MassTech webinar.
I have about 15 of these guys in my Eco-sphere.
I believe that with the change to Lean thinking – from products to services and with virtual connections to customers – we can learn to quickly adapt and adopt to new sustainable products and behaviors.
We need a value chain in the IT industry that is closed loop and sustainable, not open loop like the Story of Stuff.
I encourage you to take a moment and consider getting one of these model worlds for yourself or your best friends. It will keep you on the road to smarter, leaner and greener.
About the Author: Ryan Martensis an avid outdoorsman, founding board member of the EFCO, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by emailor RSS.
In this 20-minute interview with Michael Vizard, I do a wide survey of why Agile development practices can be so effective at cutting the costs of development and operation of strategic IT applications. Michael asked some great questions, including whether the current economic recession will stimulate change in the development process or cause it to stagnate, how people will train and staff for the coming changes, and how today’s ALM tools differ from what he refers to as the “old guard,” who are starting to claim that their tools also support Agile development.
Right now, we are all working through our 2009 budget process with the unknowns of the economic recession staring us in the face. This budgeting cycle holds more unknowns than we’ve seen in awhile, so it’s making everyone cautious about finding the right moves that will cut costs in the short term without damaging our businesses.
Unfortunately, layoffs may be part of the solution to achieving short-term savings, especially for firms hit hard by the recession. In short, layoffs suck. These highly personal actions are sad, and I am sure you and your staff may need some time to grieve the losses. But prior to cuts, there is a bigger issue to consider while managing belt tightening -– your long-term vision and direction. Put simply, it is imperative to refresh your 2009 vision before the cutbacks, or you risk destroying the morale of the whole team, losing key personnel, and dropping market share.
As you look to make cost-saving cuts, the first question is, how are you going behave?
Take the easy way out and cut in a way that fixes the short-term at the risk of harming your long-term prospects. “Across the board” cuts fit this behavior.
Rise to the occasion and cut in ways that meet short-term needs and advance your long-term goals.
On Nov. 9, Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff for President-elect Barack Obama said, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste… They are opportunities to do big things.” Clearly Mr. Emanuel is reacting by rising to the occasion – scenario number 2.
The trick to taking advantage of this crisis is to resist the pressure to simply cut without a long-term plan that everyone understands. When you do not have long-term goals, short-term fixes always lead to unintended consequences that are typically worse than the original problem. Said another way: While we sometimes get some of the intended consequences, we always get all of the unintended consequences.
A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. To accomplish this, the best long-term trend we have in IT beyond Moore’s law and the power of the Internet is the improvement of IT agility. Increasing IT agility is important because it provides a value innovation and delivery method that harnesses these fundamental advances in infrastructure.
Tom Poppendieck, a leader in the Lean IT movement, recently said, “You can’t cut costs by focusing on cutting costs. You’ve got to focus on the changes that will lower your costs over the long run.”
If you are exploring the adoption of agile software development practices and you’re prepared to rise to the occasion, this recession and the resulting belt-tightening gives you an opportunity. You have the opportunity to rally your company around a vision that will not just cut costs, but improve morale and help you grow your business in the next economic spring.
IT agility
For the 70% of you who have not adopted enterprise agility, let’s do a quick overview. Agile practices enable teams to build less, but return the same value by focusing on early delivery of the features that have the highest business value and not wasting money on the features that don’t.
IT agility is driven by three major innovations: agile development, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Web 2.0 social networks. However, without agility in development and software releases, the innovations of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are elusive.
There are three costs savings for enterprise IT agility proven through benchmarking analysis:
Lean flow provides more productive development organizations.
Better prioritization delivers the most valuable software first.
Faster time to market and incremental delivery returns income sooner.
To realize those benefits, you and your team must develop, communicate and implement an effective agile enterprise adoption driven by a highly visible roadmap. Since the late 90s, agile adoptions have followed a ground-up and incremental funding approach as early adopters proved the benefits and scalability of agile in the enterprise. Starting in 2005, leadership-led or top-down approaches have begun to dominate the scene. These larger and more systemic approaches are required for organizations that need to act fast to derive short-term gains.
For managers and directors doing their budget planning now, the next three sections outline the proof points for agile, a roadmap to enterprise agility, and the implications on this roadmap from having to make savings cuts ahead of investment.
Proven impact of enterprise IT agility
Many large and distributed development organizations have proven the positive financial impact of agile over the past five years. These findings were quantified in the Agile Impact Report. In that study, QSM Associates benchmarked Agile teams against a database of 7,500 projects and delivered the following results. On average agile teams working with Rally were 25% more productive, had 50% faster time to market, and delivered one-fourth the number of defects. (Those teams not working got 50% of those results.)
Given those improvements, it is becoming a business imperative to adopt agility, especially on your mission-critical applications. In the face of cuts and with a long-term outlook toward enterprise agility, you can now see your way to a 25% savings in 2009.
Enterprise agile adoption roadmap
Like any mission-critical systems or initiative, you need a vision and roadmap to steer your adoption and rally the troops. During the past four years, an approach fashioned from Lean manufacturing concepts and adopted in an incremental approach has proven very effective. The following illustration depicts that method.
There are three keys to effectively managing this process:
Work incrementally, in an agile fashion, through the steps and gain proficiency before widespread scaling.
Develop a vision/roadmap and change backlog with key executives before you attempt to move up to step 3 and beyond.
Share the vision and roadmap with the entire organization and manage the rollout in a collaborative fashion with complete transparency.
Many of these rollouts have started with a grassroots effort to get to Step 1 and Step 2. With the help of external coaching and parallel tool rollouts, many companies have taken more aggressive, “flash-cut” moves with top-down leadership and investment to jump to step 3 in the roadmap within months.
Flash-cut approaches
Given the pressure and opportunity of this crisis, as well as the increasing number of public proof points showing how large organizations can quickly transition to agile, you might be thinking about your ability to do accelerate your adoption and capture savings in 2009 from your efforts. From my experience, there are three things to heed while considering this:
Adopting agile needs complete management buy-in and a true sense of urgency. Many enterprises that have done this have used phrases like “burn the life rafts.” A recent Gartner report, “Case Study: Inovis Uses Agile Methods to Accelerate Product Development,” says, “The ‘big bang’ adoption approach is high risk, but it works in companies or business units with high levels of risk acceptance, and it can manage the ensuing organizational change.” What is it going to take for your management team to get buy-in to adopt Agile on a major portion of your organization? I assume the current recession will amplify any existing business needs.
You are going to need a strategic partner to help you manage this organization change effort. I do not know a company that followed the flash-cut approach without an outside coaching or consulting firm. As a result, you will have to budget for this investment and the time to choose and schedule them. These partners will help you build the organization capacity for agile while also supporting the professional development of your middle managers as the organization becomes flatter and leaner.
This is a whole system change from a world of plan-driven to value-driven ideas. As a result, you will see immediate changes in your process, organization, and technology. This transition will set up a culture of continuous improvement and even drive changes in your overall development and business strategies. To make this transition go well, you are going to need to implement a collaborative project management solution to provide visibility across your development teams. Enterprise IT agility does not scale or distribute around the world without it.
Don’t waste a crisis
We don’t know how long or how deep this recession will be. Belt-tightening and staffing cuts almost seem inevitable. You can either reduce costs by just cutting your budget, or you can use this opportunity to make systemic changes in your business. I strongly urge you to make your cuts in parallel with investment in the long-term to avoid fixes that fail.
Provided you have a longer-term vision of your organization around agile software development, some outside coaching to help accelerate your adoption and solution for distributed management, you can take advantage of this crisis to make big changes very quickly. Enterprise IT agility is proven to do that — more so than investments in technology point solutions that only have a point in time savings. Most important, this approach will help ensure the savings from today’s cuts do not create worse problems in the long run.
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