VMware is diving deeper into its value chain to decouple carbon emissions and associated environmental footprint with its customers digital operations. Under the new Zero Carbon Committed Cloud Partner Initiative, VMware will connect customers looking for low-carbon services with cloud partners in the VMware ecosystem that have committed to achieving zero-carbon clouds through renewable energy-powered operations and energy-efficient data centers.

At the program's launch, cloud-verified partners are Atea, Equinix, IBM, Microsoft, OVHcloud, and OVHcloud U.S.

The VMware-led initiative will help provide companies with a clearly defined path to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goals. 

“Technology companies are at the forefront of innovation, and this is their opportunity to contribute and go beyond efficient data centers, but also to make money,” said Nicola Peill-Moelter, VMware’s director of sustainability innovation.

While cloud providers that operate their respective clouds can only control the environmental impact of their own operations, VMware is the “the Switzerland of computing and cloud computing,” Peill-Moelter said. The company saw an opportunity to connect customers and cloud partners that are already moving toward a 100% renewable energy goal or decarbonization, she explained.

“We felt that our opportunity is here because we partner with so many public clouds, instead of a company like Amazon only being able to impact its own operations,” she added. Because of this, VMware has a responsibility to “clamp down on our own operations, mature in those goals, and extend them out to our supply chain and value chain.” 

Peill-Moelter said she hopes the new program will also incentivize VMware's cloud partners that haven't already moved in a sustainable direction. The market for decarbonized and low-carbon services is real and growing, she said: “They’re either going to get on board and have it be a differentiator, or they're going to lag behind and maybe lose business over it.” 

“There are multiple opportunities here to improve the infrastructure energy efficiency of data centers themselves at the hardware layer, virtualization layer, management layer, and even the software layer to write applications that are more compute efficient and therefore more energy and carbon efficient,” Peill-Moelter said.

Once efficiency and productivity work is accomplished in the infrastructure layer, the parallel will be to power those systems with renewable energy “because ultimately you can't get to zero computing or zero energy, so we need to be as efficient and productive as possible,” she added.

The pace of change is happening fast, but “VMware can show the business value of sustainability innovation that can help us go faster and scale, much more quickly,” Peill-Moelter said. This is especially true as VMware’s customers are large enterprises running corporate data centers that account for a very significant part of the world’s emissions.

Workloads are growing and demanding equipment to be more productive if it is to offset and reduce the amount of IT infrastructure, Peill-Moelter explained.

Virtualization holds promise for sustainable green growth in its ability to consolidate applications from multiple applications to one server and reduce energy usage. In fact, according to IDC, VMware virtualization cut over 1.5 billion megawatt hours (MWh) in power consumption and 758 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from entering the atmosphere between 2003 to 2019. 

“We hope to bring more awareness around the efficiencies that using the full stack of virtualization can bring to our partners who aren't using that today,” she added.

Nevertheless, the global power draw of all data centers —  which is currently estimated at 1% to 1.5% of worldwide electricity production — still presents a dim future without sustainable innovation in digital infrastructure to flatten the energy curve.

The Zero Carbon Committed Initiative fits into the big sustainability picture at VMware. Late last year the vendor outlined a commitment to reach 30 goals by 2030 with a focus on building an “equitable, sustainable, and resilient world,” as part of a larger movement among forward-thinking companies linked to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

To further drive sustainable innovation, VMware also committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions, thus decarbonizing its digital infrastructure from the product ecosystem to supply chain operations. The target is to achieve 100% renewable energy-powered operations by 2030.

It’s also looking to engage 75% of its suppliers by spend to reduce their emissions by setting science-based targets by 2024, and procuring 100% of their power from renewable energy sources.

At VMware, people have an understanding of what intrinsic security is in terms of embedding security into our solutions,” Peill-Moelter said. “So we're trying to play on that to help accelerate understanding of what intrinsic sustainability is and embedding sustainability into our solutions from the incipient of an idea in the design all the way to the execution.”