Dramatic recent shift in focus on sustainability: VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram

There has been a dramatic shift amongst technology leaders towards sustainability, and that has strengthened particularly over the last two to three years, according to VMWare CEO Raghu Raghuram.

The tech sector is focusing aggressively on the subject as accelerating digitalisation drives the growth in data centre usage and with it, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

At a media conference immediately after the opening keynote speeches at VMware's annual user conference in San Francisco this morning, he told Digital Nation Australia, that technology leaders were increasingly engaging with the topic. 

“I would characterise it that in the past it was solely [about] the optional interest of the CIO because of their personal interest. Or they may have situated the data centre in some urban context where the power costs are extremely high. Or the power company could not deliver the amount of power required to drive the data centre. So that was the picture when we first started.”

Asked specifically if he was seeing a trend toward CIOs and CTOs being assigned personal accountability in the form of direct KPIs against sustainability goals, Raghuram said, “That is changing actually. This is a conversation we have very regularly with my key leaders.”

Customers are increasingly requesting new functionality to deal with the practicalities of managing ESG goals, he said, echoing comments made earlier this year by SAPs CEO Christian Klein.

According to Raghuram, “It is definitely something that's a frequent topic from our customers."

It is not simply about demands to help lower power consumption according to the VMware executive we spoke with. The company's customers increasingly want tools such as carbon footprint dashboards to help them manage ESG goals.  

While Raghuram emphasised the impact of customer and employee requirements to operate more sustainability, VMWare President Sumit Dhawan also stressed the impact of board oversite as well, for whom the issue is a priority.

“Stakeholders, whether its employees or shareholders of the company, demand the executives to act, “ Dhawan said. “If you're producing physical goods, you have to manage all aspects of your product lifecycle, from production to selling the goods, and how your carbon footprint is [affected] as you're starting or growing your digital efforts.”

Earlier, during his keynote, Raghuram told the estimated 8000 delegates to VMware Explore, “When we started vSphere, when we started GFX in fact one of the key value propositions was the savings in power consumption.” 

“Now two decades later the challenges of sustainability I would say are an order of magnitude more important and relevant to us.”

In terms of VMware’s own ESG approach, he said the company is committed to running all of its data centres with 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.

Andrew Birmingham is at VMworld in San Francisco as a guest of VMware.