Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services — all powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 624,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities.
What does Accenture plan to achieve together with the Green Software Foundation, for your business and for the world?
At Accenture, our purpose is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. And there are fewer things with greater promise than sustainability—it unlocks new opportunities for our clients, our partners, and our people, and for the places where we do business. So, we have made sustainability one of our greatest responsibilities-not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we believe that it will create the most powerful force for change in our generation.
We are committed to embedding green software in everything that we do and everyone we work with. We can scale the benefits of our participation with the Green Software Foundation to our clients and our community, providing them the solutions and expertise to help them move towards their sustainability goal through green software engineering.
How does Accenture see the future of green software?
Energy is one of the most significant drivers of carbon emissions for software applications – particularly for machine learning applications. That's because most electricity is still created through the burning of fossil fuels. Ensuring that energy consumption is matched by an equal purchase of renewables is a step in the right direction. For instance, many other things can be done to further reduce AI applications' carbon emissions, including ensuring they consume the least amount of energy possible to perform their work. There are patterns of software engineering which, if used, will increase the energy efficiency of ML applications.
We believe companies need to make software an integral part of their sustainability efforts by taking its carbon footprint into account in the way it is designed, developed, and deployed. The Foundation aims to make sustainability a core priority for software teams by growing awareness, developing industry standards and best practices, and nurturing open-source and open-data projects that support the creation of green software applications.
What challenges can get in the way of progress?
Green Software Engineering is an emerging discipline at the intersection of climate science, software practices and architecture, electricity markets, hardware and data center design. So far, it has grown organically but to become broadly adopted it needs careful stewardship.
One critical challenge in developing green software is that there are no commonly agreed standards, practices, metrics and tools to measure and minimize software related carbon emissions. It will need new skills, new tools and new standards as well as a collaborative effort from business, academia, regulators, and non-profit organizations.
We also need to continuously build awareness across the industry and educate the industry about the need to have greener software.
The Green Software Foundation’s mission is to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for green software engineering. Its vision is to change the culture of software engineering, so sustainability becomes a core priority to software teams, just as important as performance, security, cost and accessibility.
Meet the other Steering Committee Members of Green Software Foundation:
Read about our Steering Committee members, what they say about working with the Foundation and their thoughts on the future of green software.
GitHub | Globant | Microsoft | NTT Data | Thoughtworks
Originally published in the Green Software Foundation blog
