Software can play an important role in reaching sustainability targets. It can enable efficient business processes, or provide carbon footprint transparency, which is the vision for SAP’s Climate21 initiative. But of course, running software itself requires electrical energy. In this session, we look at basic concepts for estimating the carbon footprint of operating software. We start from commonly used quantities like “Carbon Emission Intensity” and “Power Usage Effectiveness”. Then we show, in a simple example, how you can translate business requirements to a carbon footprint estimate for operation in your data center. For this, we use the SAP sizing methodology. Finally, we turn to the sustainability advantages of cloud, both in general and for SAP’s green cloud.

Rudolf Meier is head of Performance & Scalability in Product Engineering at SAP. He joined SAP in 2004 and has been engaged in performance, scalability, sizing, benchmarking, performance data mining, know-how transfer, and sustainability topics ever since. He holds an experimental physics post-doctorate degree from Tübingen University.