Finding the balance between rapidly advancing digital technology capabilities and ensuring sustainability requirements are met can be a headache for businesses.
Sopht was founded in 2021 to assist businesses with managing the carbon footprint of their IT operations, targeting emissions-intense areas that are often overlooked, including cloud services, infrastructure, hardware, websites, networks, and user activity. As co-founder Jérémie Veg explains, it’s important to frame IT sustainability as a combination of both financial efficiency and environmental responsibility.
Sustainability impact
“Before launching Sopht, I spent a decade in IT consulting and transformation, most recently at Capgemini Ventures,” he tells SustainabilityOnline. “The objective of Capgemini Ventures was to identify innovative solutions that Capgemini could collaborate with, and sustainability was clearly one of the key areas of interest.
“We were increasingly challenged by clients about the sustainability impact of moving to the cloud, building new applications, and embedding AI into digital products – and we didn’t really have clear answers for them. That made me realise there was room for software that could help organisations understand the sustainability journey in that context: to make them aware of the footprint of their digital products and, over time, help them reduce that impact. That was the starting point for Sopht.”
Sopht’s software-as-a-service model provides tools to enable businesses to analyse emissions and support actions to reduce them at source.
“We’re making the invisible visible, basically,” says Veg.
Building awareness
In practice, this is easier said than done. A key starting point for any organisation looking to address technology-related emissions is building awareness among IT teams themselves – particularly around the environmental impact of everyday digital decisions and activities.
“When you think about IT in an organisation, most of the people involved have no clue about their environmental impact,” says Veg. “So for me, the biggest win is making them understand what they’re doing has an impact on sustainability and the environment.”
Once this understanding is established, Sopht helps to support practical actions, such as optimising cloud usage – the company recently assisted a client in moving their cloud services from a data centre in Frankfurt to one in Marseille, which reduced their environmental footprint by a factor of eight, while maintaining the same cost.
Engagement with IT leaders, who often place low priority on CO₂ reductions, is another focus, Veg notes. Here, the discussion often revolves around financial benefits, linking efficiency improvements to environmental impact.
“You need to demonstrate that they will not only reduce costs, but also cut their CO₂ emissions. That’s why we say that ‘GreenOps‘ is more impactful than ‘FinOps’ – because it adds a new dimension to how organisations monitor and manage IT efficiency.”
The AI effect
There’s a longstanding belief among firms that IT represents only a small portion of a typical firm’s carbon footprint, however the recent AI boom is altering that narrative, Veg adds. In the automotive sector, for example, software-driven solutions are likely to account for as much as 40% of car production by the end of this decade.
As a result, while sustainability isn’t high on the agenda for the typical CIO at present, that is likely to change.
“I haven’t met one single CIO who told me they don’t care about sustainability,” says Veg. “They all care about it. But is that enough to drive a whole strategy around sustainability at corporate level? The answer is no. That’s while I think bringing the business case – linking sustainability performance with the cost of doing business – is super important.”
AI and sustainability are not inherently opposed, but their alignment requires careful implementation, which is where Sopht comes in, Veg adds.
“The question is: do you know how to effectively apply AI in your IT transformation? Do you know what model will be the right model for your use case? And will you be able to monitor over time the efficiency of your application from one release to another? That’s precisely where Sopht can bring an operational edge to this transformation.”
Learn more about Sopht at https://sopht.com/en/.
