ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY AT MICROSOFT UK

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1 ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY AT MICROSOFT UK

2 ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY AT MICROSOFT UK At Microsoft, we are committed to software and technology innovation that helps people and organisations around the world improve the environment. Our goals are to reduce the impact of our operations and products and to drive responsible environmental leadership and innovation. Microsoft s Approach to Environmental Sustainability Significant emissions reduction is a long term aim for Microsoft globally and we have committed to reducing our overall footprint by 30% by by unit of revenue. In the UK we are also participating in the 10:10 initiative 2, setting our sights on decreasing Microsoft s annual energy consumption by at least 10% by the end of In addition, Microsoft has been tracking its carbon footprint through the only global climate change reporting system: The Carbon Disclosure Project. We take keeping our own house in order very seriously and are proud of being one of the first major global companies to undertake such tracking. improve this saving, we have partnered with the WWF, joining its One in Five Challenge which tasks members to cut one in five of their business flights within five years. We are also working with neighbouring companies in Thames Valley Business Park, Reading home of our main UK campus to instigate a campus-wide sustainable travel plan, Travel 2TVP. This initiative aims to increase the use of more sustainable modes of transport such as car shares, buses, cycling and walking by 15% by September Reducing Energy Consumption We have been making great strides in reducing our energy consumption across all our UK buildings. This process has been driven by our facilities team who are working to rationalise out of hours energy use and manage our heating and lighting requirements more efficiently. We have also introduced proximity printing at our London and Reading offices which our suppliers estimate has helped us make a 14% reduction in paper usage 3. Reducing Travel Travel is a significant factor in Microsoft s carbon footprint. We have therefore reduced the amount of travel undertaken by our employees by making full use of technology such as Unified Communications (UC), web and videoconferencing. This allows our staff to meet online with their colleagues, customers, and partners in real time rather than having to commute to meet face-to-face. Globally, Microsoft uses both Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Server Web conferencing to host approximately 60,000 conferences every month. Microsoft Travel estimates that employees have cut travel by more than 100,000,000 miles in the past fiscal year, saving 17,000 metric tons of CO 24. To continue to Taking an Independent View of Our Progress At Microsoft, we understand that for investors and customers, transparent external assessment is crucial to provide an accurate view of how sustainable our business truly is. By submitting our data to The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), we are able to ensure that investors and customers can compare our carbon footprint to other companies, not only in our sector but across the board. This auditing of carbon footprints is driven by the financial sector, not government and ensures that all participants are subject to a rigorous and efficient evaluation. Whilst the CDP provides a historical insight into carbon footprints, the Carbon Trust Standard provides a forward look at sustainability plans and recognises excellence in the measurement, management and reduction of carbon emissions. In April 2010, Microsoft UK was the first software vendor to secure certification under the Carbon Trust Standard. This means that with both measures in place a more holistic view of Microsoft s sustainability path can be taken. We have also attained the ISO14001 standard for our Real Estate and Facilities which provides an independent indication as to the quality and direction of our sustainability journey. 1 Based on 2007 carbon emission figures 2 For more information please see: 3 Xerox: Monthly usage statistics taken from printers at Microsoft s two main UK offices 4 2

3 Harry Morrison, general manager of the Carbon Trust Standard comments: We ve already seen some organisations such as Microsoft UK taking steps to effectively manage their emissions. There s some great leadership out there and it is setting the agenda in the longer term. Engaging with Our Employees and Building Pride Empowerment is a key driver in making sure that all Microsoft employees take responsibility for reducing our carbon footprint and we ve encouraged the UK team to get involved and make a difference. We run regular environment and volunteering days, encouraging our employees to find out more about their own carbon footprint as well as the ways in which we are cutting the company s. We currently have six action groups tasked with improving different aspects of our environmental impact, focusing on areas such as wasting less, through to flying less and using our technology. As a result, we ve seen a high level of engagement, with over 30% of our 3,000 UK employees opting in to keep up to date on environmental stories. How Microsoft UK is Helping Customers Improve Their Sustainability Reducing Energy Demands: Cutting the 5% the IT Industry Contributes Businesses increasingly face a myriad of energy challenges that ultimately feed into reducing the use of carbon as well as overall costs. For customers, this challenge can be addressed more easily than might first be imagined. One of the first steps we suggest that customers take is to optimise the infrastructure they already have in place. Through effective utilisation of existing software, IT customers can make a real impact on their energy consumption and costs. Realising the benefits of optimisation can often be the driver to consider additional deployment projects to achieve even greater cost and energy reductions within the organisation. Reducing Energy Consumption Helping customers reduce their energy consumption can be as simple as upgrading their operating system. On average for Microsoft products, it takes companies approximately five years to upgrade a service all of our volume licensing customers are entitled to for free. Taking into account that the latest operating system, Windows 7, can be up to 30% more efficient than Windows XP and as a result, significant energy and cost savings are available. using power management features on just one computer can save more than 38 a year in energy costs 5. Beyond the PC the energy consumption of servers grows proportionately as our computing demands increase. To counter this server systems are now becoming significantly more efficient than previous releases. For example, Windows Server 2008, out of the box, achieves power savings of up to 10% over Windows Server 2003 when run on the same hardware at comparable levels of workload. Reducing the Number of Physical Machines According to Gartner the effective use of virtualisation can reduce server energy consumption by up to 82% and floor space by 85% 6. As a result, it has widely being adopted as a powerful tool in reducing the energy footprint of data centres, with the additional benefit of significantly reducing costs from energy as well as management, facility, and hardware expenses. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a virtualisation hypervisor called hyper-v. This means that customers owning a Windows Server can take full advantage of the benefits of virtualisation. In addition, according to Climate Savers, the average desktop PC wastes nearly half of the energy it consumes as heat. So, by ensuring that all PCs use the built-in power management options within the client operating system, companies can help dramatically lower their energy usage. These savings add up to significant cost savings: Although optimising server power management settings will improve efficiency, reducing the number of machines actually being used will have a greater impact. In the vast majority of businesses, servers are not used effectively and our experience suggests that the average server CPU utilisation is less than 15%. 5 Climate Savers: 6 Gartner analyst, Rakesh Kumar 3

4 Virtualisation can help solve this challenge. Rather than pay for a number of underutilised servers, it allows companies to consolidate workloads onto a smaller number of more fully used machines. This requires fewer people to manage those computers, less space to house them, and fewer kilowatt hours of power to run. A Group Policy A first step in managing an energy and environmental footprint is to bring all energy use across a company under one Group Policy and centralised reporting platform. Centralised software will help businesses manage both the physical and virtual environments, looking at the energy efficiencies which can be made across data centres, desktops and devices. Assessment and Planning Toolkit To help businesses build a holistic view of their operating systems, and to ensure they can run them more effectively, we have developed the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit Solution Accelerator. This tool is designed to help businesses simplify the planning process for operating system migrations, gather performance metrics from computers being considered for virtualisation and work out which servers can be de-commissioned to consolidate usage and reduce energy demands. Managing the Energy and Environmental Footprint: How Businesses Can Make Informed Green IT Decisions In order to reduce an organisation s carbon footprint, it is vital to have an accurate and sufficiently granular grasp of what it actually is. Assessing and then managing any business footprint is complex but there are a number of approaches which the majority of companies are now taking on board. Tracking and Measuring Microsoft s Dynamic IT offering allows for customers to make the most of the IT infrastructure that they have available and increase its flexibility and usability for users. Within this, System Center technology helps to make the building of IT infrastructure as dynamic as possible whilst using virtualisation to consolidate servers and reduce power use. Tracking a carbon footprint allows businesses to identify opportunities to improve their sustainability however, any such analysis turns out a huge volume of data to make sense of. Software is the key to turning this data into meaningful insights which a business can then act on. For instance, for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, we have developed an Environmental Sustainability Dashboard which helps businesses track direct energy consumption,indirect energy consumption and the state of greenhouse gas emissions. It can also provide a useful way to share information in a meaningful way across the organisation to engender employee and management engagement. For consumers, the Microsoft Hohm tool offers personalised recommendations on how to manage energy use at home. It is another example of a free cloud-based application and, and it is currently available in a Beta version in the US. Visualisation Tools to Track Environmental Impact Microsoft is also investing in a number of initiatives to provide transparent, collaborative, views on environmental initiatives and a real-time situation analysis. For example, we have been voluntarily tracking our carbon footprint across our 3,000 employees and eleven locations in the UK since 2004 via the Carbon Disclosure Project [ which is an independent, UK based, not-for-profit organisation holding the world s largest database of corporate climate change information. We provide the technology platform for the CDP and, in conjunction with Accenture, SAP, and the Clinton Climate Initiative, Microsoft is helping CDP enable companies to report more detailed and standardised climate change information. 85% of Fortune 500 companies are now part of this initiative sharing their footprint information across industries. Another tool that we have helped to develop is Eye On Earth [ tool provides a powerful example of the potential of visualisation tools. It works by providing key environmental data on water and air quality to European citizens through an easy-to-understand free web application. Created in collaboration by the European Environment Agency and Microsoft, it aims to support governments in not only tracking and monitoring the environment in real-time across Europe but also by capturing feedback from citizens across 32 European countries and in 24 languages. 4

5 Rethinking business practices: The potential of IT to improve the energy efficiency of the other 95% of industry and broader impact on sustainability We believe that the IT industry is uniquely placed to support other industries in their work in reducing their impact on the environment. This is backed up by the Climate Group s Smart 2020 report that states that the IT industry is in a position to help drive down overall emissions by 15% by The IT industry has a presence in so many other industries and has a significant opportunity to help to reduce the other 95-98% of the world s carbon footprint as a result. Reducing business travel, space and commuting carbon Reducing the dependency on travel is another way for companies to reduce their carbon emissions. Unified Communications (UC) provides the tools to help do this, allowing users to meet online with their colleagues, customers, and partners in real time. In combination with UC, collaboration technology can play a critical role in supporting remote workers. For example, with portals and document workspaces, offsite workers can find and share the information and files they need to do their job. Presence information, instant messaging, and web conferencing also make it easy for these employees to quickly identify who is available online and connect with them. Rethinking the Efficiency of Data Centres to Help People Take Advantage of Cloud Computing Customers can reduce their environmental impact by moving their computing from traditional on-premise servers, to off-site Data Centres that are optimised for energy efficiency. This approach helps both with energy reduction in the work place and also allows government agencies, environmental organisations, and other businesses to enjoy increased security along with the flexibility to more easily focus on the environmental impacts of their IT infrastructure. This approach not only transfers the carbon to our optimised Data Centres, but thanks to advances in our Data Centre architecture there is now an overall net carbon reduction benefit for the planet. As more computing moves to internet-based cloud computing service platforms, Microsoft is focused on addressing the environmental impact of the data centres that power it. Cloud computing reduces energy consumption by moving computing from on-premise servers to data centres optimised for energy efficiency. It also reduces barriers to developing innovative environmental solutions by allowing organisations the flexibility to scale up their needs based on what they require, without investing in additional IT infrastructure. Microsoft is focused on delivering more efficiency in power usage at these facilities. Microsoft s new Data Centres consume 50% less energy for the same level of output than data centres built just three years ago. The Dublin Data Centre which opened at the end of 2009 and has been officially recognised by the European Commission s Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign as a best practice for energy efficiency. Natural air cooling maintains the data centre at optimum operating temperatures for over 95% of the time to saving a significant amount of energy. The Dublin Data Centre has an annual Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) average of 1.25, with the objective to reach by 2012 on a scale where 1 is the optimal. The average in the industry is today at 2 and Microsoft s data centres globally are today at Innovation Microsoft invests heavily in ways that technology can address our impact on the environment. At Microsoft Cambridge Research, the team is looking into the long term effects of climate change. One of the projects focuses on building a new generation of realistic forest modelling. Forest dynamics how populations of trees interact with each other and the environment is a crucial path to understanding how forests work as part of the global ecosystem, how tree species respond to deforestation, and how forests impact climate regulation and environmental change. At Microsoft, we also recognise that innovation and creativity can come from all parts of society and we believe we have a responsibility to cultivate this. As a result we are dedicated to engaging young talent to tackle the challenge of climate change. Our global Imagine Cup Competition, which tasks students to envisage solutions to some of the biggest problems facing our society today, and the Green BizSpark initiative which helps entrepreneurs realise the potential of environmentally focused start-up businesses are a core part of this Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. 5