Salesforce – Catherine Sweere – 2009

Goals

Catherine Sweere spent her summer as an EDF Climate Corps fellow at salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, which delivers business applications to customers over the Internet. A MBA student at Carnegie Mellon University, she focused her work on salesforce.com’s IT (information technology) asset management system – by looking at various servers and specific performance indicators such as power draw and carbon emissions factors within specific service locations.

Solutions

Sweere identified the highest energy consuming assets and technology refreshes that were effecting overall environmental performance. With this information, she developed a dynamic tool that provides a feasible means of integrating energy consumption and emission factors into procurement decisions.

Potential Impact

This tool will become part of the company’s departmental decision-making process regarding the purchase of IT assets and could contribute to significant energy cost savings.