Microsoft looks to the cloud to cut its carbon footprint

CarbonSystems announced its latest customer is none other than Microsoft, which has chosen the firm's Environmental Sustainability Platform cloud application as its new global standard for managing its energy, efficiency and environmental performance reporting.CarbonSystems said it was selected based on its ability to use cloud computing to simplify and streamline Microsoft's global greenhouse gas management and reporting to stakeholders. CarbonSystems' ESP will be implemented across Microsoft's global operations, which comprise over 600 facilities across 110 countries.

"Microsoft is committed to measuring, transparently reporting, and minimizing the carbon footprint of our operations," said Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist at Microsoft. "We view CarbonSystems as a key part of our effort to achieve Microsoft's business and environmental sustainability goals. Carbon System's ESP will enable us to efficiently collect, analyze and share environmental data, delivering new levels of understanding about the resources we use." Analyst firm Verdantix said Microsoft's adoption of a single software platform to manage its sustainability performance underscores a global trend to standardize the capture and management of disparate non-financial data just as energy, emissions, and other environmental metrics.Verdantix CEO David Metcalfe said: "Many organizations struggle to capture and integrate sustainability data sourced from different localities as they strive for a single version of the truth. By adopting the CarbonSystems' solution Microsoft will have one platform for managing and reporting non-financial sustainability."ESP is a cloud-based data management engine that allows global electronic data interchange with internal systems and third party suppliers. Its deployment has the potential to deliver important benefits to Microsoft, the companies said, including automating energy and sustainability data collection to support CDP reporting; cutting the time and cost of managing corporate environmental information by automating the capture and tracking of energy, water and other environmental data from utilities and third party suppliers; and providing up to date, auditable business and compliance reports via dashboards summarizing energy, emissions and other environmental data.The platform is as well hoped to inform efficiency and cost-saving decisions by providing a range of environmental performance analytics just as benchmarking, forecasting and marginal abatement cost analysis tools, as so then as to help verify the impacts, return on investment and payback from efficiency initiatives.