 Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, Peer Storage, The Path to Sustainable IT. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Peer Storage. Nicole, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me, Lisa. Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Peer just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me, what nuggets are in this report? Well, actually quite a few, really interesting nuggets, at least for us, and I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about 1,000 sustainability leaders across the globe to understand what are their sustainability goals? What are they working on? And what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals? I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world, we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMIA being a larger, having sustainability goals that were more significant, but we actually did not find that. We found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. So very interesting. At Peer, sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their own carbon footprints. And so we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space, power, and cooling costs and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80%. Well, juggling to tripling the performance of their storage system. So it's really critical for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. Right, those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with IT. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you're seeing despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, we know that IT has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, IT is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. Definitely has to be cross-functional. So strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program, development, execution, et cetera. Was correlations, were they a surprise? Not entirely. When we look at some of the statistics that come from the places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. And that's now almost three years ago. Digital data only accelerates. And by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for IT to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective. Like we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. And that's really a tip of hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do. But for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I want to dig in a little bit to Pierce ESG goals. What can you share with us about that? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, Pierce kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the sustainability front for a long time. It's funny as we're doing a lot of this work and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now, because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. We did a baseline scope one, two and three analysis and discovered interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers running our products in their data centers. So we know that we've made some ambitious goals around our scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris Agreement. That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Peer Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations there. Lofty goals that Peer has set, but knowing what I know about Peer, you guys are probably well on track to accomplish those goals in record time. I hope so. Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides IT sustainability team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? Yeah. So I think understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right? In your entire IT portfolio. We know that we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of energy and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as again drive down that climate change. So we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are about reliability or cost, et cetera and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision-making. So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in where sustainability is concerned. How can Pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand the value in it for them? Yeah. So I mean, I think that for me my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand first of all the impact on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece. On the mind piece, I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of the equipment. And so, especially if you're in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation, better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see that maybe the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking and there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. That's a great point, great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out, some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. Thank you, Lisa, it's been great speaking with you. Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable IT. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.