What are the next steps towards sustainability for the tech industry?

Data centers are huge energy consumers. Reducing data consumption and storage needs while improving the thermal management of the data centers themselves would help make our connected world more sustainable.

Make business travel an exception rather than the norm.

adoption of cloud services will be really helpful. Moving from monolithic architecture to micro-services and tightly-coupled services to loosely coupled is the way forward. Infra as code and CI/CD is must to have.

A lot of systems automation is coming into play to reduce your footprint where you need to hire people. Whether it's a back office function, operations function, or even certain parts of the sales administrative function, it can be automated and optimized through machine learning models, optical character recognition (OCR), and contracts review. We are building OCR-based models that can review the terms and make recommendations based on past contracts. That way there are less legal people worrying about minutia; they should be talking more about the other things we can do. It reduces your hiring needs at the administrative level, and gives you better stability in the contracts, etc. 

The same goes for the machine learning model we are working on to optimize technology spend for a big insurance company. We are building a model where you can inject all contracts data, licensing data, all employee usage data and HR data to get recommendations that can help you save on licenses and optimize your contracts. Those are all spends which have some cascading downstream impact on whether Salesforce has to increase their capacity because a few more million users are joining, or whether we reduce that and hopefully negatively impact salesforce utilization. It reduces the economics and eventually, the downstream compute is impacted as well.

Companies like ITRenew drive sustainability in a really interesting approach. They basically take a waste stream and turn it into a supply chain. They're an IT asset disposition vendor that takes all of those retired racks—including the open compute version two racks—and either parts them out or refurbishes them.

I looked at the costs and if you can get the same thing, you save an incredible amount. So I see that being an interesting trend that's going to roll up, because now it's just another supply chain. Because of the pandemic, any chips, memory, storage, or flash you can get out of those machines are hot commodities. People are paying leased prices for those devices because they can't get them from Intel and Samsung, etc. That's going to dry up at some point, but all this waste is definitely another supply chain.