Device42 tunes IT infrastracture tooling to measure carbon emissions

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 that ability to look at how each part of the system was contributing to carbon emissions.

"Our focus as a platform is to discover IT infrastructure, the breadth and depth of discovery going from mainframe to cloud and everything in between. [That includes] the physical layer all the way to the application and everything in between, including operating systems, software services, even the resource utilization data to help companies with right sizing," company co-founder and CEO Raj Jalan told TechCrunch.

The company decided to use that in-depth knowledge to give customers insight into the sustainability of the tooling they are using, and he says what makes his company's approach different from the competition is that they tend to look at data center power consumption, power, utilization and power efficiency, and then generate a carbon emissions or sustainability dashboard that's focused on data center power consumption.

"What we have done differently is, since our focus has been marrying application data down to infrastructure, now we can tie your application to sustainability and your carbon footprint, and that's kind of unique about what we are releasing," Jalan said.

He said this difference can have an impact on board level conversations about sustainability. "Instead of talking about how much your data center is costing you, how much energy is costing you, you can now start to think about what your carbon footprint looks like on an application level," he explained.

While this is a logical extension of what Device42 has been doing up until now, the company still had to build the capability to understand this type of information at this level. It builds on earlier work to add AI-enhanced data to the platform.

"And this was taking all of the data we have in this discovered data, the enriched data, and now transforming that into a calculation around your sustainability, your carbon footprint, and then tying it back to your application," he said.

The new tool is available for customers at no additional cost, says Jalan.

The company launched in 2010 and has raised more than $38 million, per Crunchbase. Its most recent raise was a $34 million Series A in 2019.