One week on from AWS re: Invent 2021. Something Werner said toward the end of his Keynote has stuck in my head.
He talked about how tech leaders are just as responsible for their carbon footprint as any other industry leader.
Surely, this narrative extends to their Private Equity firms.
Are carbon emissions now on your firm’s radar?
Last year, Blackstone announced plans to cut carbon emissions by 15%. This is in the first three years for new investments of buying the asset or company.
That’s a good start.
Green savings are often overlooked in technology, particularly the cloud.
Cloud providers are doing most of the heavy lifting, reducing emissions for you.
1) Planting trees to offset carbon
2) Putting data centres underwater
3) Using AI to decide when to cool or heat servers
Even with the cloud providers doing all the hard work, the cloud still has a big impact on your green credentials.
This is where the new Sustainability Pillar for AWS Well-Architected Framework comes in.
For those who don’t know about the well-architected framework (WAF).
The Well-Architected Framework is AWS’s way of getting you thinking about developing services in the most efficient way.
There is a push in this area as a reaction to customer concerns about cost, performance, and security. I’d like to see Amazon commit more in this area.
The challenge they have, for example, spending less money, goes against how AWS incentivises their account managers. But, being green changes the game.
Being green has the added benefit of saving big $’s.
Consider how much value reducing tech costs and emissions could create for your portco. Performance Efficiency not just in increases to EBITDA, but improves your ability to change the way your portco does business. All while not having to worry about the underlying technology is doing.
If being green isn’t on your PE firm’s agenda yet, it will be next year.
Until next time.
Thomas
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