As part of its mission to help the software industry contribute to a more sustainable future, the Green Software Foundation (GSF) released the alpha version of the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification, a method for scoring a software system for carbon emissions. As a member of the GSF, Globant helped to make this solution become a reality, and is proud to be one of its early adopters.
Being a digitally-native company, we at Globant believe it is imperative to acknowledge and mitigate the impact technology has on the environment, and continuously reinforce our commitment to make software development greener and more sustainable for our own products and processes, as well as those of our clients and partners. Through improved sustainability of both our own IT value chain and that of our clients, we contribute to achieving global sustainability goals.
Going one step further in Green IT, on July 2021, Globant joined the Green Software Foundation – an institution of global organizations committed to creating best practices for building sustainable software to reduce carbon footprints. GSF is building a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tools, and best practices for software technology. Each of the member companies has in common the desire and the need to collaborate with all industries to combat climate change.
What is the SCI and what are its benefits?
The SCI serves as a compass for reducing the total carbon footprint of software. Rather than creating a methodology for calculating the total carbon footprint of a software system, the SCI is focused on providing information about how companies can reduce their carbon footprint. The SCI is not an all-in-one solution; it’s a rate of carbon emissions for software that serves as an important guidepost to ensure companies are traveling in the right direction.
“This marks a huge milestone, not only for the Green Software Foundation but also for the IT industry as a whole,” said Santiago Fontanarrosa, VP of Technology at the Sustainable Business Studio at Globant. “Currently, the two biggest challenges that we are facing in the green software space are first, agreeing on a common methodology and knowledge corpus (the what), and second, creating the tools that allow us to measure the energy impact of software (the how).”
The SCI specification aims to address the first challenge, and it will definitely accelerate the development of the second challenge as well. “We believe that software needs to be part of the climate solution, allowing us to exponentially accelerate the carbon footprint reduction plan and achieve the 2030 targets.”
Creating immediate, real impact
At Globant, we understand the impact that technology has on the environment, and we share the responsibility to invest in making both our products and software greener.
The Software Carbon Intensity score can be calculated for any type of application, including console games, cloud applications, mobile applications, web applications, and internet of things (IoT) devices. It can be calculated for a large distributed enterprise application with a dedicated team, or for a shared open-source library.
We believe that all organizations, both individually and together, need to play their part. “We are entering an era in which there is a total paradigm shift on how we envision software as a whole. Going forward, ‘bit by bit and byte by byte,’ the next evolution for companies will be the ‘Sustainable Digital Transformation,’” remarked Santiago Fontanarrosa.
