Friday, May 18, 2013: CA Technologies has been assessing plans to change its Hyderabad development facility into a solar-powered site. However, the company is still unsure if the option-if executed—will work for its 130 other locations worldwide.
According to the company’s Boston-based chief sustainability officer, Cynthia Curtis, “The initiative is part of a global strategy to reduce the company’s carbon emission by 35 percent by 2020, using 2006 as the base year.”
“Because we’re a software company, our biggest issue is facilities and data centers including our research labs. Energy [needed to power these buildings] is our biggest challenge and contributor to our carbon footprint. So we re-scoped our office space. We employed smart-sizing, utilizing different types of furniture and layouts for our offices. This enabled us to shrink our real-estate footprint,” said Curtis.
Curtis told that CA is currently in the process of evaluating its plans with to execute solar energy at its development facility in Hyderabad, which is spread across 450,000 square feet.
The company has evaluated six submissions submitted last week against this project and has shortlisted three bidding companies for further discussion. She referred to company’s plans as ‘still exploratory’ in nature and informed that there is no timeframe to begin implementing solar energy.
“The intermittent power supply there is unique to the area. We don’t experience this level of discrepancy anywhere else in terms of power requirement versus availability,” CA’s Hyderabad facility practices rainwater harvesting and also uses this for irrigating its landscape.
“Not only is it about reducing their energy requirement and the associated costs, it’s also about ensuring our customers are able to acquire the appropriate level of support. So it’s [about adopting] a SaaS-first mindset. That’s the model we have employed and the model we’re accelerating,” she added. “For larger initiatives we’re looking at, like the solar project in Hyderabad, it still has to make business sense,” Curtis said.
