Sustainable offerings

€arbone

Context and challenges  

The current general context, which is forcing companies to focus on sustainable development policies, has created major economic, environmental and sales challenges.

• Economic: Rise in energy cost, optimizing manufacturing processes, controlling transport costs
• Environmental: Environmental regulations constraints, compliance with sector-specific requirements, "green" communication transparency
• Sales: "Green" labeling, brand image and reputation, competitive advantage resulting from environmental responsibility

The aim of Business & Decision's €arbon (Euro carbon) offering is to manage environmental actions and indicators in order to formalize compliance with standards, goals and demonstrate that resource consumption reduction is synonymous to cost reduction. Return on "green" investments can thus be measured.

An offering that combines technology with features

Combining components such as Carbon accounting (Bilan Carbone®), Business Intelligence, analytical costing or accounting is done within a system that converges towards energy consumption control, and then reduction. From a general perspective, this creates convergence towards the management of economic and environmental indicators.

The offering, designed for companies of all sizes, is based on the implementation of an innovative reporting system which not only adapts to each and every customer's business activity and organization, but also to their respective regulatory or sector-specific constraints.  Numerous examples are available to illustrate indicator specificities according to activity. Simulation of a rise in energy cost, comparison of origin of bought products, e-commerce impact on distribution costs, socially responsible investment percentage in a banking book, compared sales performance of "geen" labeled products: some of the many indicators used as part of the action plan, when implementing a sustainable development project. By setting up €arbon management, companies are now able to economically justify, and even finance, their eco-friendly initiatives.

The information system thus integrates three complementary reporting levels:

• Regulatory compliance indicators
• Carbon efficiency measurement as per objectives
• Carbon costs tracking during and after the project

The Green Data Center

An eco-friendly service center or the "Green data center" Business & Decision Eolas, Business & Decision subsidiary specialized in 24/7 managed online services, has a fourfold skills range: applications design and development, webmarketing, dedicated service centers and Internet and Intranet sites hosting. Business & Decision has adopted the European Commission's Code of conduct for eco-friendly data centers. The Group was thus one of the first data center operators in Europe – not to mention the first one in France - to adopt this code. Moreover, one of its data centers is currently being totally renovated to become a "Green" center, one of the first to exist in Europe. Business & Decision Eolas, co-founder of the Greenethiquette, has adopted it for its hosting offerings.

The goals

This latest generation data center is the result of a long-term initiative that is in line with the Group's sustainable and green development policy. It was born out of partnerships with the Rhône-Alpes region's local authorities and companies, as well as world experts in the field: universities, big manufacturers' research laboratories, competitiveness clusters. So, innovation is at the heart of this project in terms of design, but more importantly in terms of our desire to meet eco-efficiency criteria such as high availability, an activity recovery plan, virtualization or cloud computing.

The context and challenges

Five years from now, big data centers will cost as much in electricity and air-conditioning as in hardware infrastructure. Their energy consumption is on a drastic and unstoppable climb upward (>20% per year). The required energy density has increased tenfold in the past ten years and this trend is not abating. Most data centers will not survive this.

In light of this observation, data centers must face 3 major challenges: the electricity bill, increasing volumes of data and service quality. A holistic approach is required to minimize energy consumption and adopt a "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" line of action.
A high-end data center providing on-demand services, specialized in some business applications, and totally customizable to cater for each and every one's specificities. A modular approach is also a must since it will help the company evolve towards new generation data centers in a gradual and selective manner.

Partnerships with experts

To successfully carry out this project, Business & Decision entered into a partnership that is based on complementary expertise areas.

The data center's technical characteristics

Various principles help shape this project's characteristics: renovation of the existing building, use of environmental conditions for cooling purposes, use of the most eco-efficient electrical, IT and cooling equipment, data center good practices and management procedures setup and finally, use of fiber optics.

The center's characteristics were defined by the H3C, an independent audit company that formalized level of performance of the data center's technical, industrial and environmental specificities.

Greenethiquette

Greenethiquette encourages IT users to commit to eco-responsibility guidelines where IT resources are delivered through outsourced services. Its objectives are : Raise awareness by documenting impacts of digital services with respect to the environment. Commit to fair energy use guidelines and adopt a permanently focused approach (with emphasis on best practice adoption, performance monitoring and transparency) Influence eco-responsibility from hosted service suppliers by requesting a commitment to environmental guidelines for reporting on eco-efficiency

Greenethiquette is a charter   :

• drafted by the digital service provider, that enforces a commitment with the hosted service provider.
• a label that is open to all, to formalise a code of conduct : no minimum service level with the exception of basic market standards (the European Code of Conduct, ClimateSavers..) shall be requested to the parties involved.
• a unique charter on the market as it is targeted at a new group (the consumer of the physical IT resources, rather than the provider). The charter is fully backed-up by standards, which determine the measuring elements and practices to be used. The charter defines transparency rules, ensuring energy output data is shared between the provider and the consumer.

More information on www.greenethiquette.com