Competing software providers need to forget about traditional rivalries and integrate their sustainability-focused products together if the industry wants to achieve accurate carbon measurement and reporting systems, Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann told SDxCentral.

"We have to actually do this together, meaning that we need to integrate so many of the technologies that will drive this revolutionary change toward renewable energies, toward energy harvesting technologies, all of that — that needs to be somehow integrated into other software, into other technology platforms, and so on," Zimmermann said.

Software providers SAP and Siemens both offer carbon footprint management and carbon accounting software products, for example. According to Zimmermann, these tools should be integrated with other software tools from competitors in order to realize a truly accurate carbon accounting system.

"When you think about larger organizations, there are so many spots in the value chain where you need to extract all the data [on] where carbon is being produced," she said. And it's not simple to monitor and collect those disparate pockets of data.

"We're getting the sense that you need to orchestrate first of all this data, but you also need to find different ways to put it all together with different software tools," Zimmermann added. "And there's no way one single company will be able to do that, so integration and collaboration is really key."

Gartner predicts carbon footprint measurement tools will reach early mainstream adoption within the next one to three years.

Zimmermann stressed that for every organization, "sustainability is no longer an option. It is an imperative." Gartner's latest Sustainability Tech Impact Radar outlines different sustainability-focused technologies and identifies their potential impacts and timeline of adoption.

Along with carbon footprint measurement tools, Gartner expects cloud sustainability and advanced grid management will become common practice before 2025. Cloud sustainability refers to organizations using cloud services to pursue sustainability goals within economic, environmental, and social systems.

Public cloud services, for example, offer sustainability benefits by nature, Zimmerman said, citing their ability to centralize IT operations and operate at scale, which results in energy efficient computing.

"Public cloud providers also have a unique ability to invest in sustainability capabilities, such as moving cloud data centers to be physically located near renewable energy sources," she added.

According to Gartner, cloud providers will experience increased pressure to develop and report on a transparent climate strategy and roadmap. The firm also predicts carbon emissions of hyperscalers' cloud services will be a top three consideration in cloud purchase decisions.

But outside pressure on hyperscalers' sustainability efforts doesn't seem to have hit mainstream yet. Microsoft, which reported its Q3 results this week, did not include any information relating to its sustainability commitments during the earnings presentation. Investors also ignored Microsoft’s sustainability efforts, focusing on other topics such as supply chain constraints during the Q&A portion of the call.

Zimmermann identified carbon capture and storage as technologies on the impact radar that are "a little bit more neglected or overlooked" despite their potential for mitigating climate change.

The biggest issue with carbon capture is that "you are basically giving a fossil fuel energy-using company a tool to continue to use fossil fuels, but eliminate carbon while still using that old-fashioned method," Zimmermann said.

And that's contradictory, because the goal is to move all power consumption to renewable sources. "That's the bitter note in this" and why many believe carbon capture isn't "the real way forward," she explained.

Despite downsides, carbon capture and storage are still important as a complementary element due to the likely slow progress of a complete renewable energy transition. "There are estimates that say actually without carbon capture and storage, we're not going to get where we want to get by the middle of the century," she said.

However, the price of these technologies is extremely high at the moment. Zimmermann hopes that with adequate research and development, those prices can decrease "at least 60-80% in the next few years."

The world's biggest energy-consuming and carbon-emitting organizations need carbon capture and storage tech "quite urgently in order to bring those emissions down," ideally in tandem with pursuing renewable energy sources, she said.