SAN FRANCISCO – VMware CTO Kit Colbert showcased the vendor's accidental environmental sustainability success at last week’s VMware Explore 2022 event, claiming its virtualization products have helped the world avoid 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the past 20 years.

The vendor's vSphere platform reduces the amount of physical servers enterprises need, which in turn lowers energy consumption. But this was a “side effect” on the vendor's pursuit of solving other problems — not necessarily the intention. “We weren't even trying to do that,” Colbert said. “Just think about what we can do if we actually apply our minds to it.”

One of VMware's ideas to intentionally lower environmental impact surrounds data visibility. As multicloud architectures continue to grow in popularity and evolve, Colbert imagines a future where that architecture could allow enterprises to “automatically move workloads to where energy is the cleanest, toward most renewable, thus reducing your overall carbon footprint.”

“It's one thing to be efficient, but it's another thing when you start looking at a bigger picture to look at how can we actually, in a multicloud world, migrate workloads to where energy is the cleanest?” he added.

This idea hinges on the abilities to both understand data and track it in real time, which then allows for well-informed decision making in terms of power usage. Improving carbon efficiency means “getting smarter about things like scheduling, getting DRS to be more understanding not just of compute, CPU, memory usage, storage efficiencies, etc., but also carbon usage of a cloud platform and how it places workloads,” Colbert noted.

As the company thinks about innovation more broadly, it must consider “the environment into which we are all working and moving and how the industry is evolving,” he said, and the constant of change is the pretty much the only consistency.

Most VMware customers are trying to do too many things at once: cloud migration, multicloud management, and cognitive application development — driven by business needs, he explained.

“As we think about how we're driving innovation, we've got to be really focused on the fact that the only reason we do innovation is to be impactful,” Colbert said, tying VMware's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts into its self-proclaimed mission of innovation.

ESG, which he describes as synonymous with “sustainability, equity, [and] trust,” is the successor to corporate social responsibility, “and that term was kind of about doing good for the world, being nice, and giving back. ... It was, you know, a generosity,” he explained.

While ESG touches on some of its predecessor's themes, “I find it to be fundamentally different, because it's not about doing the nice thing. I mean, yes, it is good for the world, but it's actually a business imperative,” Colbert clarified.

The pressure that renders environmental sustainability a necessity for modern business success comes increasingly from boards of directors and investors, and “we're seeing more and more about this,” he said. “This is a big focus area.”

Read all of SDxCentral’s VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.