GreenOps – platform for measuring, piloting, and reducing the environmental impact of IT
Country of development/application:
France
Scope of innovation
☐ Office work
☒ Production / Service supply process
Sector-specific
☒ Yes / please, specify sector(s): IT
☐ No (relevant for all sectors)
Description of the needs
Some figures:
• IT gas emissions are two times higher than civil Aviation.
• 4.2 trillion dollars globally are invested by companies into IT in 2021: the equivalent of the German GDP.
• 40% of chief information officers (CIOs) have already defined a Green IT strategy.
The world is probably facing the most critical collective challenge of the last centuries – a Climate Change drama in which everyone needs to take its own responsibility.
Among the various sources of environmental impacts, there is one that is clearly not as tangible as others: IT. Its virtuality, its immensity, its omnipresence in people’s daily activities and operations make it almost invisible. Today’s and tomorrow’s organizations have to better apprehend their eco-digital-transformation.
The French startup “Sopht” automates its clients’ IT decarbonation by using the technology as the main lever to its own environmental impact. And leave any compensation activities as a 2nd last option.
Description of the solution
Sopht is a 360° GreenOps platform helping IT organizations measure, pilot and reduce their environmental footprint. It demonstrates the convergence between driving an IT decarbonisation journey and optimizing the cost related to IT operations. Sopht develops a catalogue of application programming interface (APIs) helping it to dynamically collect data from all existing (and already deployed) monitoring solutions: VMWare, VSphere, InTune, ServiceNow, Dynatrace, Azure, AWS, etc. Sopht then normalizes the data from a methodology standpoint (fully transparent and adaptable for its clients) and either displays it in its digital cockpit or sends it through APIs into its client’s environmental, social, and (corporate) governance data lake.
The GreenOps platform relies on 3 main modules offering several use-cases and levers to reduce environmental footprint:
1) Multi-Cloud rationalization > capacity to compare all key Cloud Service Providers (Azure, AWS, OCI, GCP, etc.) environmental footprint at service and VM level (Sopht does not rely on CSPs carbon footprint simulator, it directly collects “Cost & Usage” reports and normalizes the data between CSPs). In 2021, 6.5 million tons of CO2 eq. were wasted into Data storage that were unused or with no more value and more than $17Bn were wasted into cloud spendings .
2) Back to Front digital services optimization > capacity to measure and pilot the environmental footprint of digital services (applications) running on Client’s infra (on premise, private cloud, hybrid). Sopht also measures specific customer journeys on a given application. This helps the organization to better reconcile 2 worlds: the word of DevOps/Infra and the world of Product Owners. In normal application usage, it is only 10% to 20% of total functionalities that are used by end-users and this explains why Sopht often sees its clients using their VMs resources at less than 10% capacity.
3) IT asset efficiency > A big chunk of IT environmental footprint comes from all devices (laptop, desktop, smartphone) that are deployed and used within an organization. The question then becomes, do we have the right IT asset allocation for the right people usage and with the right set of applications installed? Do we rotate or proactively maintain the equipment fleet based on observed usage and carbon amortization? Gartner published a study stating that for 1000€ spent on a device it actually costs 3000€ in maintenance and IT support. When we know that hardware represents globally around 50% of total IT CO2 emissions, it is more than needed to better monitor the usage and allocation of those devices.
Description of the effect
Environmental benefits
• Dynamic data collection: frequency of data collection – every second.
• Data sources: 360° IT Infra coverage.
• IT Assets: reducing IT fleet environmental impact by optimizing – allocation through their real usage monitoring: increase detention from 3 to 6 years. – model selection thanks to a precise manufacturing carbon weight: up to 75% reduction.
• Cloud: reduce up to 10 times cloud environmental impact by optimizing datacenter selection and taking into account their full carbon footprint
Financial benefits
• Review the data storage policies, by implementing a multi-cloud strategy costs can be optimized and up to 30% on Cloud Service Providers bills can be saved.
• Extending the computer retention by one year (from 3 to 4 years for example) allows to save 25% of CO2 and €.
Company/companies that developed/implemented/offer the innovation
Sopht is a startup or self-employed founded in 2021 in Villeurbanne, France. Sopht helps IT organizations to reduce their environmental impact while optimizing costs, by offering a range of use-cases and levers through its GreenOps platform.
Address: 69100 Villeurbanne, France
Website: https://sopht.com//en
Contacts through the website: https://sopht.com/en/contact-us/
9. Additional information