TEAM Atlassian Corporation PLC

By Sara Castellanos 

Information-technology executives are pushing to make their systems more energy-efficient, developing and tweaking software to cut waste and tracking how much energy their operations consume.

The trend is partly driven by board-level sustainability mandates. But in many cases IT leaders are choosing to play a bigger role in reducing the energy consumption of the hardware and software at the core of their companies. A crucial part of that is companies' move to the public cloud, which cuts down on energy-guzzling data centers.

"The beauty is that things that are sustainable are actually good for the company, even monetarily," said Sri Viswanath, chief technology officer at Atlassian Corp., a Sydney-based maker of online collaboration tools for businesses.

Atlassian aims to run all its direct operations, primarily buildings, on 100% renewable energy, including wind and solar, by 2025. The company has 12 offices in seven countries. Its Mountain View, Calif., office is already fully powered by renewable energy.

The company shut down its data centers about three years ago and moved to Amazon.com Inc.'s public cloud in part to reduce the company's carbon footprint, Mr. Viswanath said. His technology team also rebuilt the code underlying two of Atlassian's biggest products in part so that software developers used less computing power, which resulted in less energy use. That project took about two years.

Carbon emissions are expected to surge as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain become mainstream and require more computing power.

Developing a single AI model can have a carbon footprint equivalent to the lifetime emissions of five average U.S. cars, according to a paper published this month by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

U.S. carbon emissions rose 3.4% in 2018 after three years of declines, representing the biggest jump since 2010, when the economy was rebounding from the recession, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"We should always be looking at how the technology we manage and support can have a role in sustainability," said Juan Perez, chief information and engineering officer at United Parcel Service Inc.

UPS drivers have been using proprietary software since 2016 that calculates massive amounts of data to give them optimized routes. The tool saves UPS about 100 million miles annually, which translates to a reduction of 10 million gallons of fuel and 100,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, the company said.

UPS is developing tools aimed at optimizing daily package flow throughout the company's U.S. network of package-sorting facilities, which will also help reduce emissions, Mr. Perez said.

The internet, including computing infrastructure, could use up to 15% of all the world's electricity and emit up to 7% of the world's energy-related carbon emissions by 2030, says Anders Andrae, a researcher at Huawei Technologies Co. That's up from about 7% and 3% today, respectively.

One common way that IT departments waste energy is by over-provisioning, or buying more computing or storage capacity than their servers need. Being able to pay for what you use, which cuts costs and saves energy, was a major reason that online crafts marketplace Etsy Inc. shifted to Google Inc.'s cloud.

"We knew we were wasting a ton of energy in the data centers," said Mike Fisher, Etsy's chief technology officer, who oversees 400 engineers. The company aims to be wholly powered by renewable electricity by 2020. As part of that effort, it is investing in solar farms and other projects.

Mr. Fisher's team has also made tweaks to save energy, and money. Certain data-processing jobs for AI algorithms, for example, are run on virtual machines that ultimately use less energy because they offer flexible computing power and can be shared among Google's other enterprise customers.

Sustainability is also becoming a selling point for vendors. Chris Wellise, chief sustainability officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said about $312 million of revenue, or 1% of the company's total revenue of $30.9 billion for fiscal year 2018, was attributed to deals closed based on sustainability conversations with customers.

Mr. Wellise expects revenue from such products to increase by up to 30% a year, not just for sustainability reasons but because they save money. The sector includes software tools that let IT departments identify "zombie servers" and other hardware components that are wasting energy because they aren't being used.

Salesforce.com Inc. recently developed a prototype of a software application that lets companies measure, analyze and manage carbon emissions from data centers, offices, employee commutes and business travel, because sustainability issues are a growing priority.

"We are seeing a huge increase in how much people are asking about it -- CIOs, employees and customers," said Patrick Flynn, vice president of sustainability at Salesforce.

The app, currently being rolled out to 10 initial customers, pulls carbon-emissions data through application programming interfaces -- pieces of software that enable apps, platforms and systems to connect with each other and share data.

Emissions from Salesforce's data centers have increased to 244,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent in fiscal year 2019 from 149,000 tons in 2017. But the company says its total carbon emissions are offset by measures it takes to avoid, reduce and mitigate energy use.

Electronic-signature technology company DocuSign Inc., one of the Salesforce app's beta customers, began formally prioritizing sustainability in 2015. It uses the public cloud in part for energy-efficiency reasons.

Kirsten Wolberg, DocuSign's chief technology and operations officer, said she is changing her team's third-party-supplier processes to evaluate vendors' focus on sustainability. "I'm turning that lens back on my own corporate data centers, looking to see where we can be more green," she said.

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 24, 2019 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

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