Device42, a startup that helps companies understand and manage their hybrid infrastructure, can see a lot of information about each customer’s hardware and software usage. The company decided to use this ability to look at how each part of the system contributes to carbon emissions.
“Our focus as a platform is on IT infrastructure discovery, the breadth and depth of discovery from the mainframe to the cloud and everything in between. (This includes) the physical layer all the way down to the application and everything in between including operating systems, software services and even resource usage data to help companies scale Right,” company co-founder and CEO Raj Galan told TechCrunch.
The company decided to use this in-depth knowledge to give customers insight into the sustainability of the tools they use, and he says what makes his company’s approach different from the competition is that they tend to look at data center energy consumption, power usage and energy efficiency, and then create a carbon footprint or sustainability dashboard which focus on energy consumption in the data center.
“What we’ve done differently, because our focus is on integrating application data all the way down to infrastructure, we can now tie your application to sustainability and your carbon footprint, and that’s kind of unique about what we export,” Galan said.
He said this difference could have an impact on board-level conversations about sustainability. “Instead of talking about how much your data center costs you, how much energy it costs you, you can now start to think about what your carbon footprint looks like at the application level,” he explained.
While this is a logical extension of what Device42 has been doing so far, the company has yet to build the ability to understand this type of information at this level. It builds on previous work to add AI-enhanced data to the platform.
“This was taking all the data that we had in this discovery data, the rich data, and now it turns that into a calculation about your sustainability, your carbon footprint, and then relates it back to your application,” he said.
Galan says the new tool is available to customers at no additional cost.
The company started in 2010 and has raised over $38 million per Crunchbase. Its most recent $34 million Series A raise was in 2019.