(energetic music) Nothing gets better, unless it's measured; Sustainability is no exception. Hi, I am Tom Shields. And on today's Intelligence Report, measurement and continuous improvement of your energy and carbon footprint. We've got two experts. Let's go first to IDC. Dave, I'm really interested to know IDC's perspective on emerging standards for measuring energy and carbon footprint in an IT estate. It's still a work in progress, but companies are exploring different ways of both measuring their own performance and how they communicate it externally to customers and other people in their ecosystem. They really need our help in order to measure themselves and report how they're doing on sustainability. Absolutely, they're not gonna solve this problem themselves. They're gonna look to vendors that can help them both in defining the standards and then also how they will apply software to be able to measure and report on them. Jumping over to Matt Watts at NetApp. Matt, what are the trends you see going forward? How will IT vendors help organizations start measuring themselves to improve sustainability? It all starts with standards and kinda standard measurements. And I think we're starting to see that kind of IOPS sustainability on an IOPS capacity per kilowatt. Now, what vendors have to do is provide dashboards, provide kinda telemetry that allows us to actually display that, and show that to people, and do that consistently. And if all vendors can do that, we've got a level playing field that people can work from. Then stepping on from that, it's make it actionable. It's great to tell people what their sustainability posture is, but it's even better if you can create it and make it actionable. "So here is what it looks like, here's where you stand, "and here are some of the things that you could do "that are actionable, "and here's the impact "that they would actually have for you." We talked about actionable recommendations. So what might be a few examples that an IT vendor might give to a customer using their equipment that would help rationalize carbon and energy across their IT estate? Let me give you an example. Just simply from a storage perspective, right? If we can understand what data people are storing, what kinda workloads they're using on the array, we can also look and say, Well, "are you applying "all of the storage efficiency capabilities?" And that's a really basic one. We could also look at, is there an opportunity to tier data that isn't so frequently accessed or doesn't have the same performance requirements? Could we tier that to a media that has a lower power consumption? Could we tier that to the cloud where we're able to tier to a cloud in a region that we know has a lower cost of emissions? All vendors have an opportunity to look at the features they have within their products and provide actionable recommendations of how people could use them in a much more sustainable fashion. So actionable recommendations sound amazing, but can we bring automation into this at some point? I think it's certainly a possibility. If you look at what we're doing with tools that exist within the public clouds right now, we're seeing very,powerful optimization tools that are aligning cost and compute resources to the workloads that are there. I don't see any reason why another dimension to that can't be sustainability, resource consumption, and therefore emissions, and having an automation platform that allows us to be able to align the most sustainable resources with the workloads that people are looking to run. Final question, Matt. How do we give customers a way to measure their progress consistently over time? I think it needs to be part of the telemetry that we are offering to customers. And that telemetry needs to have historical data. Give people a baseline of this is kind of where you are today. And through those actionable recommendations that we've talked about, we need to give people the ability to understand what is the positive impact thatrecommendation is going to have on them. And then as we find more opportunities, more recommendations that we can make to show them, "Where did you start?" "How have these recommendations affected "you in a positive way over time?" And "How will these new recommendations continue "to keep you on that kinda positive trajectory "towards reducing the amount of power consumption "and therefore emissions being created?" Perfect, excellent. Thanks Matt. You heard it, help is coming. The right vendors will help you continuously measure and improve sustainability across your IT estate. If you're interested in more on this topic, we have two other episodes in our Sustainability series. One on "Reducing data waste" and the other on "Partnering Wisely for Sustainability." Be sure to tune in. (energetic music)