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Ep 1. Navigating sustainable web efficiency
60 Plays9 months ago
Join us in the inaugural episode of "Green IT on a Cloud" as we delve into the cutting-edge world of sustainable web performance. In this episode, we shine the spotlight on Quanta.io, a visionary French company that has pioneered a free for all solution to measure the environmental impact of a website.
Guillaume Thibaux, Founder and CTO of Quanta.io, takes us through his environmental awakening and what it meant for his business and beyond.
Subscribe now to stay informed and inspired as we navigate the exciting frontier of Green IT on a Cloud with Quanta.io. And take the time to check out your own website eco-performance here: Calculez l’impact environnemental des sites (quanta.green) . It's in French but numbers and scoring cards never lie ;).
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Transcript
Introduction to Green IT on a Cloud
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Green IT on a Cloud, a podcast that celebrates the success stories of sustainable practices in IT. Going green does not have to mean business sacrifices. In fact, cutting waste can make your company lean, efficient, and more productive. This podcast features interviews with experts and innovators by shaping the landscape of sustainable technology.
Meet Guillaume Thibaut: Eco-Friendly Tech Innovator
00:00:27
Speaker
Today I'm pleased to welcome Guillaume Thibaut, an entrepreneur who's dedicated his career to making the digital world more eco-responsible while at the same time enhancing the web experience. Guillaume co-founded Quanta in 2012, an organization which aims to optimize and make energy efficiency of digital technology, particularly by reducing the ecological footprint of web applications.
00:00:53
Speaker
Guillaume also is the co-architect of the digital sobriety school, a free and open tool that easily measures website carbon footprint. Hopefully we'll dive into that a bit later on in the conversation. So to welcome Guillaume and thanks for joining me today.
The Green IT Transition: Performance and Eco-Initiatives
00:01:09
Speaker
Hello, thanks a lot Rob for inviting me today to this podcast and especially to talk about an important subject that is green IT and I'm just a bit laughing in saying that it's important because we will be able to talk about that but
00:01:28
Speaker
the impact of our digital world is actually very important today and there is a big challenge in front of us. So thanks a lot for the introduction. You were saying that I'm working since 2012 about this subject.
00:01:50
Speaker
It actually became a bit later, to be very clear, I started working, when I co-founded Quanta, I started working on a web performance, which is quite linked to Green IT, because that doesn't have the name. Web performance is more like working on the efficiency of a website to make it faster. And in Green IT,
00:02:19
Speaker
appeared as a clear goal later on, because we thought at Quanta that we wanted to do our part to make the world habitable for the next generation. And in the last years or so, and so like three, four years ago, we started to make our application and our services more aimed at reducing the carbon footprint for web applications.
Can Green Practices Enhance Business Efficiency?
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting. And one of the themes that we're running through this podcast is
00:02:53
Speaker
that being green is a positive move. I think one of the trends that's been found, particularly in mainstream media, is that everything green tends to have a bit of a negative connotation. You can't do this or you have to reduce or work in a way that's less efficient. And what we're interested in, and particularly around your story, is how
00:03:19
Speaker
going green makes you more efficient and is actually a benefit to your organization. I think that's a story which just isn't spoken about enough. But anyway, before we sort of dive into that, it'd be great to go right back at the beginning and just understand what motivated you to go down this route.
Addressing Digital Carbon Footprints: A Personal Journey
00:03:42
Speaker
A computer science degree, you could have done all sorts of things,
00:03:47
Speaker
What inspired and motivated you to move into the realm of sustainability?
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's a mix of two things. So one thing is my passion for IT since childhood. So I did a computer science university, which is an epitheque in France.
00:04:18
Speaker
And so I have always been a computer geek trying to optimize stuff. So I liked things when they were fast. So that was a bit the first years of me trying to do something good for the society, for the people working in IT.
00:04:48
Speaker
personal realization regarding the environmental crisis. I think it depends on people. Some people know from when they are young, they know that something is going wrong.
00:05:07
Speaker
in between what the humans are doing to nature but that was not me so I think until five or six years ago I was basically living my life and not thinking too much about the environmental impact.
Making Sustainability Accessible: Quanta's Mission
00:05:26
Speaker
of our activities and I started to read and also to watch conferences regarding these subjects and especially the link in between the energy we are using
00:05:41
Speaker
and its impact on the environment. And I realized that it was very urgent and it was a matter of, yeah, let's say it's a matter of life and death for a huge number of people. It's hard to measure how many people are at risk in the future if we don't react
00:06:07
Speaker
very, very quick, especially regarding the global warming. But it's very, it's clear that it's urgent. It's very important. And to me, it was clear that this subject was going to be on the top priority for me in my life. And, and so I when I went after saying that,
00:06:30
Speaker
I was, I thought, okay, so what can I do from where I am? So my job is to be running a company with my co-founder, so Roman Amazon, who co-founded Quanta, who is a CEO today. And together, we discussed a lot on what we could do, especially with Quanta.
00:06:53
Speaker
And because we were coming from the world of web performance, we found that the best idea for Quanta was to do our part reducing the carbon emissions of digital applications. And so that's what we're doing right now in the last years or so.
00:07:16
Speaker
So it's very interesting. I think the pick up on the points that the energy we use with our digital activities is something that I don't think it's isn't talked about a great
How Does Quanta Measure Website Carbon Footprints?
00:07:30
Speaker
deal. We all understand that our computers are using energy to run them. But the actual applications that we're being delivered and the websites that we're using are also
00:07:40
Speaker
consuming energy and sometimes at a considerable rate. Your goal of the company's goal is obviously focused around the carbon footprint of a website. It would be really interesting to understand how that technology actually works and how you go about assessing the carbon footprint of a website.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, there's different aspects in measuring the impacts. And I'm saying impacts with an S at the end, because there is not only the carbon footprint, but also the amount of water that is required to run the system and also the metals that are extracted to build.
00:08:32
Speaker
the servers and all the terminals and network infrastructures. So there is multiple aspects that we need to look at and what we decided to do at Quanta is to make that subject
00:08:51
Speaker
easy to grab for everybody, for companies, for organizations, but also for end users so that they could know which brand is working well with Green IT and which brand is not playing the game in reducing its impact. So to do this,
00:09:17
Speaker
We built a solution that analyses the pages, the most viewed pages of a website. So to do this, it's completely automatic. So basically what we do is that we go into the search engines.
00:09:33
Speaker
And we type the URL of the website to get the top pages of this website. And then we make tests with real browsers that analyze many criterias to make sure that the page is not too heavy. And then we make a big calculation
00:09:56
Speaker
which is based on algorithms that are already proven, that were made before Quanta. And those algorithms and all the data that we are gathering helps us to basically to display a big score. We call that score the digital sobriety score. So it's in between zero and 100.
00:10:25
Speaker
And it tells you if your website is green or not. Basically, if you're above 50, it means that you're doing good. And if you're below, it means that you really need to work on optimizations because you're missing the Paris Agreement trajectory.
00:10:47
Speaker
So that's what we do at Quanta to measure, to help people grab that score and to use it to optimize our websites.
Optimizing Websites for Carbon Reduction and Efficiency
00:11:00
Speaker
So when you help somebody optimize their website, obviously the initial focus is to reduce the carbon footprint, but do you also end up with other advantages?
00:11:15
Speaker
I sort of should imagine if you're using less energy or you're going to be more efficient. So does it typically end up with the website being more responsive or what typical outcomes do you see? Yeah, there is different positive outcomes of working on green IT. It depends a bit on what you're optimizing. There is in between web performance, so the idea of
00:11:44
Speaker
optimizing a website to make it faster, faster to use basically and working on Green IT to make it more responsible for regarding its footprint. There is a very big common area where if you do like one specific optimization, you're going to have an impact, a positive impact on both
00:12:09
Speaker
of those subjects, so the website is going to be faster and the carbon footprint will be also lighter. But some optimizations can be splitted and are not linked together. To give you an example,
00:12:26
Speaker
Let's say that my action today regarding my carbon footprint for my website is not to reduce the content, but to move the website from a country where it is hosted, but where the energy, the electricity is carbon intensive.
00:12:50
Speaker
And if I move it to a country where the electricity uses less carbon, it will improve my carbon footprint, so it will be better, but it will not be faster for the end user.
00:13:09
Speaker
So, yeah, sometimes it changes just one of the two, but for, I would say it's more than half of the optimizations that you can do on a web application is going to help both at the same time.
00:13:25
Speaker
Yeah, obviously that's a great benefit. One of the questions that when we have these discussions around the environment and how we're going to improve our carbon footprint or reduce our carbon footprint is how do we quantify
Measuring and Justifying Environmental Impact for Businesses
00:13:43
Speaker
this? How do we measure our success? You speak to a lot of people and they'll come up with sort of
00:13:55
Speaker
I want to say justifications for their activities, which are good and in the right spirit. But when you put it down and say, OK, how do we measure where we were today as to where we are tomorrow? So we can, for instance, if we were doing a return on investment, for instance, we would we would say.
00:14:19
Speaker
perhaps save this amount of money or we're going to reduce the amount of hours we need. There's a pretty tangible ROI there which you can put into a business plan for instance. How do you approach that with the environmental impact?
00:14:36
Speaker
It's pretty much the same. I mean, we definitely talk about a return on investment regarding the amount of CO2 that we are saving and to
00:14:54
Speaker
To give you an example, basically when at Quanta, when we start working on a web application, what we do is that we plug our solution to the website. The solution is going to grab all the most viewed pages, so the one that absorbs the most traffic, so that
00:15:17
Speaker
These are the pages that will account for the biggest part in the carbon footprint. And for all those pages, we are going to audit what are the optimizations that we could do to improve each of those pages.
00:15:37
Speaker
And then with this data, it gives you a very simple dashboard that tells you, OK, let's say if you convert your images from JPEG to WebP, for example.
00:15:53
Speaker
That's from the non-tech who are listening to us. So basically, it's converting images on the website from one format, which is a bit old school, and to another one, which is now much better and more efficient. So if you do this, you save a lot of transfer over the network. So it's going to be a huge benefit.
00:16:20
Speaker
And so if you do this optimization, so Quanta is going to tell you what you're going to save in advance regarding the fact that let's say you have 80% of your pages that have this problem with those images.
00:16:38
Speaker
So if you do once for all your websites this conversion from one format to the other, then we are able to calculate already. Before you do it, we are able to calculate how much CO2 you would save if you do this optimization. So that really helps the different teams
00:17:01
Speaker
to decide where to start. Even when I was working in web performance, I've done a lot of optimizations in my career. It's great. You can spend days and nights to do this.
00:17:21
Speaker
But at the end of the day, what you want to optimize is really what matters the most. And you need to be very pragmatic to start with the ones that will account for the biggest impact. So it's very important to have a clear view.
00:17:43
Speaker
on which of those optimizations will have the biggest impact, and then you can start optimizing. But you really need to do it in that way. Whatever is the tool you're using, I think in terms of how you organize your work regarding optimizations, it's really the way to do it.
Case Study: Reducing Emissions for VB E-commerce
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah. And what would be interesting is
00:18:08
Speaker
Perhaps to put this into context, some details on what you can actually talk about, organizations you've worked with. Just to get a feel for the sort of scale of improvements that can be achieved by focusing on those types of activities and the types of content that you've just discussed.
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, you mean like numbers? Yeah, roughly. What are we talking about volume wise here? I guess what's interesting is that there's obviously effort put in, there's going to be effort for an organization to go and do this type of activity. What kind of results can they expect?
00:18:52
Speaker
I would say that already when you look at things, when you compare the before and after optimization with one or two
00:19:10
Speaker
very well chosen optimizations. You could divide by two the carbon footprint of your website. And if your website is not a small blog, but if your website is a huge e-commerce website, for example, you will save
00:19:34
Speaker
hundreds of tons of CO2 each year. So that's the equivalent of taking the plane to go around the Earth quite a lot of times, so to make that orbiting in comparison with other activities. So it really depends, of course, on how much traffic you have on your website. But if your activity is quite heavy in terms of traffic,
00:20:04
Speaker
you will save huge, huge numbers. And I think in some sectors, it can be quite hard to save those amounts of CO2, especially if you're working with an industrial area, an industrial field.
00:20:27
Speaker
With IT, it's almost magic when you do very well-chosen optimizations. You don't touch the hardware, you just touch the software and you just reduce the amount of servers that you will need to run the same application.
00:20:50
Speaker
So yeah, it can be quite impressive. Of course, sometimes it needs more work. When I say one or two optimizations, in some context, it can be quite a big organization to do this gap. To give you an example, last year, so in 2023, we worked with VB, which is
00:21:20
Speaker
one of the leaders in e-commerce in France, and they had an average cardboard footprint for their pages of 0.5 grams per page. And now it's more half of that. And they've done that using our application to choose which optimizations would be useful first.
00:21:46
Speaker
but also they needed to have their developers to work on how images were sent to the end users. So they had to make different changes. It was not completely automatic, but when you work seriously on the subject, you can be very efficient.
00:22:10
Speaker
That's really, and very useful to be able to quantify, and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are being challenged on how do they show results, what are the improvements, but that's really useful to be able to quantify down to grams, even to that kind of granularity of grams per page, and then scaling up depending on the
00:22:34
Speaker
the usage and traffic of the website.
Aligning the Digital Sector with the Paris Agreement
00:22:36
Speaker
Maybe to add something about the number of grams of CO2 that are emitted every time we view a page, it's actually a number which is quite central regarding the trajectory that we need to make
00:22:58
Speaker
regarding the digital sector. So I'm talking about the trajectory we need to do to be respectful of the Paris Agreement. So the Paris Agreement tells us that before 2030 we need to cut our emissions by half.
00:23:19
Speaker
And it says that for all sectors and in the digital sector, we are going quite in the wrong direction because right now the digital sector accounts for 4% of the world greenhouse gases. And it's increasing by 8% each year.
00:23:44
Speaker
So our job, all of us, not just at Quanta, but everybody who is working in the digital world, is to make sure that our organizations are not increasing 8% per year, but are decreasing. So we need to decrease by approximately the same in the other direction. We need to reduce by 7%.
00:24:10
Speaker
If we reduce by 7% each year in 2030, we will be half of what we are today. So to give you one figure about if we relate that to one page. So one page today emits around 1.3 grams of CO2.
00:24:34
Speaker
So we need the average needs to be at 0.6 grams maximum by 2030. So that's the goal. So every action we can do to be close to that will be better for our future.
00:24:51
Speaker
That's great. That's really interesting. It's already been quantified and there's a goal. Obviously without a goal, we're going to get there. So that's good.
Collaboration in Sustainability: Quanta's Initiatives
00:25:00
Speaker
One of the things that you talked about there, which I think is a general theme in sustainability is it's kind of down to all of us. There's no, we have to take individual responsibility for our actions and
00:25:13
Speaker
I think the general approach to sustainability is one of cooperation. And I know you're involved in working with other organizations. It would be interesting to get your view on how you collaborate within the sustainability industry and any advice you have for people who want to get involved. How easy is it?
00:25:39
Speaker
what sort of organisations and what directions should people look into to become part of the movement.
00:25:48
Speaker
From my perspective and in my perspective with the French market is that there is more and more companies now taking the subject very seriously. Some companies didn't start yet, but
00:26:12
Speaker
let's say like half of the companies I run into is this year, this last year were already working on the subject. But it's really a start because when they start working on the subject, actually they don't, because the science of measuring the environmental footprint
00:26:38
Speaker
of digital activities is quite a new science. They very often they don't know where to start. They don't know how to measure where they are. And so they are looking for
00:26:54
Speaker
experts, they are looking for applications to help them, but some of them are a bit lost because today there is no, it's not like very easy to start this kind of project of really reducing the environmental impact of the digital assets. So that's what we decided to do at Quanta is to
00:27:21
Speaker
help everybody to grab this subject easily and also to connect with other companies that are also working on the subject to make sure that we are all building the best tools with the best algorithms
00:27:43
Speaker
to make sure that we can work together, even with the competitors. Because this subject is new, it's in our DNA at Quanta, and we believe that it's better to work
00:28:00
Speaker
also with your competitors to make sure that the algorithms are the same everywhere so that you have standards instead of just working with your own tools and not sharing anything. So to do this, we have been part of different groups in France. So to name just a few, we are part of Planet Tech Care.
00:28:28
Speaker
which is connecting different companies through events. So it's really useful to connect and to share our case studies also, so what we have done best with our own customers.
00:28:46
Speaker
We are part of Impact France, which is a group of French companies and associations that are driven to make the future the best space as possible. So it's a bit
00:29:02
Speaker
It's a bit larger than just green 80. In impact France, you have a lot of companies that are working as best as possible for other environmental issues. But in this group, there is also people that are doing carbon budgets for companies, so it's very interesting.
00:29:28
Speaker
And one last that I can name also is Boavista.org. So Boavista.org is a non-profit interorganization. And the idea behind Boavista is to build tools that are open sources to make sure that everybody can have access to a good calculation
00:29:56
Speaker
about their digital impact, basically. So that's also quite fun with Boavista, that they organize hackathons. So we can join a hackathon where our developers are coming, and we can participate in increasing a new version of benefiting a new version of those open source tools. So that's quite complimentary.
00:30:24
Speaker
to what Quanta is doing for a living. That's great to hear that spirit of cooperation. That's great.
Advice for Starting Your IT Sustainability Journey
00:30:32
Speaker
We've been chatting on for a while here and I'm trying to keep these... I can talk to you a lot more. Lots of other interesting things. Maybe we'll do a follow-up session, but just to sort of wrap it up.
00:30:45
Speaker
I like to end this way on getting you to perhaps give some advice for people who want to get involved in a transition to implementing a greener solution. What would you say, where should someone start? If they're coming into this, they know they want to
00:31:05
Speaker
reduce their carbon footprint, they want to make an impact. Perhaps what will be useful maybe is some advice on how people sell this in their organisation, because that's one of the challenges. I think there's a lot of good intentions, but to actually start an initiative and actually get your organisation to take action. Have you got any advice?
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah. Of course, I am really happy to share some advices that could be useful to everybody on this subject. What I could say first is if you're working for an organization or if you're an independent,
00:31:54
Speaker
working for others or even if you're a student. I think what's really important is to learn as much as possible on the subject at first. There is a lot of documentation online, there is a lot of
00:32:14
Speaker
webinars and videos also that you can watch to really understand the subject of what's important regarding green IT. And maybe to name one thing that you can do also is that you could participate
00:32:32
Speaker
to Climate Fresca. So Climate Fresca is a workshop which lasts around three hours and it aims to give to a group of people as much information as possible on the climate.
00:32:53
Speaker
and also on what are the actions that could save us in the end. And so this frisk is something that you can do online or you can organize that in your organization.
00:33:11
Speaker
So it's one way to grab the subject. And so when you have this information, you will realize where are the most impacts regarding how the terminals are being built and so on. So it's very interesting. I really recommend it.
00:33:33
Speaker
And after that, when you start working on your own application, what I can encourage you to do is to be very pragmatic and not to spend too much time optimizing things. If you didn't plan before that, it was a big game changer regarding the overall impact of your application. So you really need to focus on the things that matter the most.
00:34:02
Speaker
And to do this, so if your web application is a website or an e-commerce website, the best way to do this is to take the top, let's say the top 100 most viewed pages and with those pages you will just
00:34:24
Speaker
look at it and to make sure that it's really light and so you will analyze what are the next optimizations that are required to make it lighter. And maybe one last also thing that I could recommend, and especially as we built that tool for free, so at Quanta,
00:34:49
Speaker
on the side of what we do with our customers, we are building another tool that is completely free to use. So you don't even need to create an account or enter an email to use it. It's on the website quanta.green. And on this website, you can just enter the URL of your website.
00:35:14
Speaker
and it will calculate automatically the digital sobriety score for your website. So based on the top 10 pages, so it's like a very quick audit of your website regarding Green80 and it gives you a first view of where you are and I think it's really important to
00:35:36
Speaker
have a first picture of where you are before you start your optimizations. Because after you optimize, you will be able to come back to it to make a new test and then to see if you have actually improved your footprint and if you are below or above the limit of what's required to respect the Paris Agreement.
00:36:02
Speaker
That's great. It's a great way to end this this podcast with a way to start your journey. So that's a really nice way to wrap it up. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a really informative conversation. Thank you Robert. The knowledge in the subject is great and hopefully everybody who's listening has enjoyed and learnt something. So thank you so much.