SaaS is good for the planet.  VaaS is an example. I’ll give a few reasons: Eliminating in-house phone system equipment reduces power consumption by about 20 watts per user at a company premises. The smallest phone systems might support 10 people which is about 200 watts of power that is being consumed.  According to a report released by Jonathan G. Koomy, Ph.D and Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Stanford University (estimating total power consumption by servers in the U.S. and world),   “typical” power use for low-end servers is about 200 watts. Which means that if you have 10 users on a phone system, your business is consuming the same power that a low-end server would be using.  Amazing! According to Nortel, who claims to be very efficient, a 500 seat Nortel system, not including phones or network infrastructure, is estimated to consume 10,000 watt-hours, or about 20 watt-hours per user. M5 consumes 28,000 watts to support 31,000 users, or about 0.9 watts per user; clearly a difference in power consumption and one that does not go unnoticed by our small and medium customers who are very environmentally conscious.

By the way, that’s expensive too. 10,000 watt-hours is 10kw hours is about $1/hour or $8,760/year.  

1. SaaS and VaaS help prevent commutes: people can work from home easily.  US average commute is 20 miles per day with an average gas mileage of 21 mpg. A car generates 20lbs of emissions for each gallon of gas consumed. One employee telecommuting once a week can prevent about 1000lbs of emissions into the atmosphere every year. 

 Of course, this also saves money. 1 gallon/day = $4.00.  Could easily be $1000/year. 

2. Don’t forget that eliminating all those servers and systems avoids junk getting thrown out. E-Waste, or electronic waste, makes up more that 5 percent of all municipal solid waste worldwide. As more people upgrade their PCs, TVs, mobile phones, and enterprise servers and phones recycling or eliminating the e-Waste altogether becomes ever more urgent.

 Even America’s teenagers are going green these days, isn’t it time other phone vendors got the call to go green too?