Tag: cloud
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IBM to increase the amount of renewable electricity it procures
After returning from IBM’s InterConnect conference recently we chided IBM for their aping of Amazon’s radical opaqueness concerning their cloud emissions, and their lack of innovation concerning renewables. However, some better news emerged in the last few days. The Whitehouse last week hosted a roundtable of some of the largest Federal suppliers to discuss their…
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IBM’s InterConnect 2015, the good and the not so good
IBM invited me to attend their Cloud and Mobile Conference InterConnect 2015 last week. Because of what IBM has done globally to help people get access to safe water, to help with solar forecasting, and to help deliver better outcomes in healthcare, for example, I tend to have a very positive attitude towards IBM. So…
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Apple, cloud computing, and enterprise supply chain management
Apple’s recent announcements around renewables and supply chain transparency, put the major cloud providers to shame. Apple had a couple of interesting announcements last week. The first was that they were investing $848m in a 130MW solar farm being built by First Solar in California. With this investment, Apple enters into a 25 year power…
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Lack of emissions reporting from (some) cloud providers is a supply chain risk
We at GreenMonk spoke to Robert Francisco, President North America of FirstCarbon Solutions, last week. FirstCarbon solutions is an environmental sustainability company and the exclusive scoring partner of CDP‘s (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), supply chain program. Robert pointed out on the call that there is a seed change happening and that interest in disclosure…
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Microsoft powering more of their Cloud from renewables
We’ve mentioned the issue of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with cloud computing once or twice in the past, and we’ve even ranked cloud computing companies based on their emissions. Obviously not all cloud companies report on their emissions (shame on you Amazon), and consequently those that don’t are at the bottom of the rankings.…
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Ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things, and the discovery of sound
I had a really interesting, wide-ranging, conversation with SalesForce’s VP for Strategic Research, Peter Coffee the other day. A lot of our conversation revolved around how recent changes in the Internet of Things space, in ubiquitous computing, and in Big Data and analytics area are enabling profound effects on how we interact with the world.…
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Cloud computing companies ranked by their use of renewable energy
Cloud computing is booming. Cloud providers are investing billions in infrastructure to build out their data centers, but just how clean is cloud? Given that this is the week that the IPCC’s 5th assessment report was released, I decided to do some research of my own into cloud providers. The table above is a list…
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SAP to power its cloud computing infrastructure from 100% renewable energy
Cloud computing is often incorrectly touted as being a green, more environmentally-friendly, computing option. This confusion occurs because people forget that while cloud computing may be more energy efficient (may be), the environmental friendliness is determined by how much carbon is produced in the generation of that energy. If a data centre is primarily powered…