Virtual Sales 3.0 Conference March 20th - 21st 

 

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How Salesforce.com and AppExchange Help the Environment

By Geoffrey James

Salesforce.com is the world’s largest vendor of cloud computing, and its AppExchange program has encouraged the growth of a massive environment of similar cloud-computing applications. While most buyers of sales and marketing technology realize that cloud computing is far cheaper than applications hosted inside a captive data center, few realize that cloud computing is also a greener option.

The reason is simple: As a general rule, the providers of cloud-computing applications run those applications inside data centers that are significantly more energy efficient than the data centers of other companies. Most important, the providers are heavy users of a technique known as virtualization, which increases the capacity of their computer systems while reducing the electricity consumed to provide that computing power overall.

From a green standpoint, virtualization reduces the number of physical servers required, thereby reducing floor space and cooling costs. For example, most nonvirtualized IT environments (such as those in the typical data center) have computers that run at an average of 15 to 20 percent of their potential central processing unit (CPU) workload. That’s much like driving a car in a busy city, where it would end up idling most of the time.

It is not unusual with virtualization to see CPU utilization as high as 80 percent. While a CPU running at 80 percent utilization runs “hotter” (and therefore consumes more energy) than a CPU running at 20 percent, there are certain fixed costs that remain the same. As a result, that increase provides four times as much raw computing power but only consumes 20 percent more energy.

Because of virtualization, cloud computing decreases the overall demand for additional servers to run CRM and associated applications. This not only saves costs, it also makes it unnecessary for those servers – and all the assemblies and chips inside them – to be manufactured and shipped. From a sustainability standpoint, that’s a very good thing, because computer manufacturing in general (and semiconductor manufacturing in particular) requires clean facilities and very clean components. Providing such cleanliness inevitably involves removing impurities that account for major sources of pollution.

So by electing to use salesforce.com with AppExchange add-on applications, your company is making a choice to be more environmentally friendly and is significantly reducing its carbon footprint. That’s a big win by anybody’s standards.