Adopting Cloud Computing to Green Your Enterprise

by Tricia Reilly

At a recent Zuora board meeting, one of our board members, unable to find a paper cup in the kitchenette, returned to the board room mug in hand noting how ‘green’ a company we are.

At Zuora, we take a hands-on approach to efficient resource management and reducing our environmental impact. And although we strive to reduce waste, encourage recycling, and carpool as much as possible, making your business environmentally friendly can be a bit of a challenge.

The good news for us is that leveraging cloud computing services, running a subscription business, and implementation of SaaS projects all offer great ways to green your IT department.

But what’s good for the Earth can also be good for business:

• New “green” data centers equipped to handle cloud computing are finding ways to operate better, faster and more efficiently than in-house operations because it’s all they do. Better energy efficiency means a reduced carbon footprint.
• Subscription services delivered online are inherently green because you only pay for what you need as capacity is shared across multiple customer instances to reduce overall power, hardware, and software components.
• By leveraging services in the cloud, you free up valuable internal resources to focus on developing solutions that you can actually sell. And that means the kind of green you can take to the bank.

These points prove that greening your company can be an amazingly lucrative business option. If we are aware of the possibilities, we can make environmental consciousness an everyday reality of our corporate culture.

We are making progress but it’s really important to understand that everything from printing, faxing, and paper waste to use of computer hardware, data centers, and electricity impact how green your business is.

I can think of some innovative ways Zuora uses the cloud to reduce our carbon footprint: Google Docs, WebEx and eFax are just a few. What are some ways that your company uses cloud computing or SaaS projects to make your company greener?

Subscriptions for Going Green

by K. V. Rao

Recently we announced our new product Z-Payments and partnership with PayPal. It was a very exciting launch for us and we’re thrilled to have formed this alliance. And while visiting PayPal last week, I learned something really cool. Well actually, a couple of things.

The first is that PayPal resides in an entirely green, LEED certified building. As announced in this May 2008 blog entry by Scott Thompson, PayPal’s new building is solar powered, energy efficient, reduces water usage by 30 percent and is built from recycled materials.

The second cool thing has to do with the above-mentioned recycled materials and our sweet spot – subscriptions. It turns out that PayPal actually subscribes to their carpet! It’s made of recyclable materials, and they have an annual subscription to replace and recycle the carpet.

We’ve been touting the value of a recurring revenue streams at the heart of subscription businesses. It seems that subscriptions are also about renewable resources. We applaud the innovative carpet company that PayPal subscribes to and hope to see more examples of using subscriptions to help people and companies “go green.”