#3 Sopht x BNP Paribas: how to reduce the digital impact of IT departments?

Hugo de Broucker : Sopht’s founders spent nearly 10 years working on digital transformation projects for major companies. They found that one link was systematically missing: the assessment and consideration of the impact of these activities on the environment. Yet, the digital sector accounts for a large and growing share of global CO2 emissions, around 4%*. The digital sector emits 2 times more greenhouse gases than civil aviation*. It is becoming crucial for companies to be able to manage these carbon emissions. Sopht is part of this strategy, providing IT departments with tools for calculating and understanding the impact of their activities on the environment, with the ultimate aim of contributing to decarbonisation.

*source Shift Project

Hugo de Broucker: At Sopht, we prefer to talk about collaboration rather than partnership. Firstly, it provided us with a fantastic guide to finding our way around a group the size of BNP Paribas, making it easier for us to meet the right entities and the right people. Working with B!UP has also enabled us to take full advantage of the Station F environment and the connections that exist within this ecosystem of start-ups. It’s priceless to be able to take advantage of B!UP’s strike force to move forward and to be part of a forum dedicated to start-ups operating in green IT or elsewhere. We felt that the accelerator really had the ambition to help these companies grow and take off.

The prospects for our collaboration are quite clear today: we’ve already been able to demonstrate the value of Sopht, the seriousness of our approach and our capacity for industrialisation to IT teams, and we’re currently in discussions with other BNP Paribas entities. That’s what the accelerator is all about: proving our worth and replicating this approach in different sectors. 

Hugo de Broucker: I’d like to share the fruits of our experience. Although it’s still in its infancy, we’re beginning to see very concrete results in terms of optimising hardware, which is a major source of emissions. We can see that companies upgrade their hardware very frequently, usually every 3 years. This is where the greatest potential for reducing our carbon footprint lies. We’ve performed simple simulations for our customers, comparing the impact of replacing 25% or 50% of their hardware over a period of 3, 4 or 5 years. Based on a benchmark of hardware and its emissions, performance and efficiency, we draw up trajectories that enable our customers to think about a more economical depreciation strategy without compromising efficiency. The gains are truly significant.

1. Stage 1 :
   The calculation. Sopht collects concrete data over a defined period of time, which is an essential prerequisite for measuring the carbon weight of activities. This data is then tracked in real time, so that the CO2 consumption associated with an IT department’s activities can be known at all times. More than a snapshot on a given date, this provides a continuous film to monitor the decarbonisation trajectory and ensure that actions are effective.
2. Second 2 :
   Once the data has been collected, it is transferred to a management platform accessible to customers so that together they can define the standard threshold (the benchmark against which they will be measured) and the reduction targets, which are often linked to those of the Group. Sopht co-builds this trajectory, because its actions can have an impact on all the users of the same system, so we need to be careful. Sopht’s mission is to combine all the company’s challenges: environmental, business performance, application availability, effective use by customers, as well as its financial challenges.