CASE STUDY
CAST uses software intelligence to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption of enterprise application
CAST, the software intelligence leader, provides software that ‘understands’ multi-technology software systems and automatically derives insights about their inner workings.
CAST Highlight enabled CAST to make its software greener and identify the opportunity to reduce annual CO2 emissions by over 400 kg for a single application.
The automatically generated Green Software Insights from CAST Highlight enabled us to identify exactly where in our code we could improve our green impact and then estimate the actual CO2 emissions savings with concrete numbers.
Michael Muller
Director, Product Management
Over 400 kg CO2
in potential annual emissions savings for a single enterprise software application
Over 1,000 kWh
in potential annual energy consumption savings for the application
Challenge
CAST is a software vendor with multiple products that are used by large enterprise clients and government agencies internationally. The company started measuring its carbon footprint to support emerging ESG reporting requirements. CAST then made a commitment to significantly reduce its carbon footprint over the coming years.
A key contributor to CAST’s CO2 emissions is their technology assets, including their enterprise software products. They needed a way to accurately measure the Green Impact of their software, get recommendations on how to reduce CO2 emissions generated by their applications, and develop a repeatable model that could be integrated into their software intelligence products. This would enable their clients to also utilize these insights and help reduce the CO2 emissions of their application portfolios.
Solution
CAST used one of its own products, CAST Highlight to measure the Green Impact of one of its enterprise applications and get recommendations on the specific green deficiencies within the code that could be fixed to reduce CO2 emissions generated by the application. An application performance baseline was created using diagnostic tools available on their cloud service provider where the application was deployed. This baseline measured the execution duration of some key functions of the application.
CAST used the Green Software Insights from CAST Highlight to fix a subset of the green deficiencies in the code. Then, the execution duration was measured again using the optimized version of the application to compare to the baseline.
Results
The optimized version of the application had a 5% improvement in execution duration compared to the original version and only needed four person days of effort to fix the selected green deficiencies. These results were used along with the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) formula from the Green Software Foundation (GSF) to develop a model for estimating the potential improvements in CO2 emissions and energy consumption for the entire application.
When applying the model to all the deficiencies in CAST’s application, it demonstrated a potential opportunity to reduce annual CO2 emissions by over 400kg and energy consumption by over 1,000 kWh.
