Intelligent Data Centres Issue 28 | Page 62

Ed Ansett , Co-founder and Chairman of i3 Solutions Group , discusses the position of SaaS providers who act as both customer and supplier . He explores whether power use is rising up the agenda for SaaS companies and their customers and asks if not , then why not ?
ew consumers think about the electricity that powers

F their applications . But for the enterprise sector , whose reliance on SaaS is growing , this is not something that can be ignored .

That leaves many questions . How is the energy use and cost being priced into the services such as SaaS ? Are SaaS providers paying too much for power ?
SaaS providers are focused on cost per transaction ; meaning this becomes a question for the data centre operator . Should SaaS providers demand energy cost transparency and that data centre power provision be more flexible and adaptable ?
SaaS power
The figures below reveal there is little doubt that SaaS is taking over the global enterprise software market . So , what are the power cost implications for SaaS players and their data centre partners ?
At first glance , SaaS , like its enterprise application perpetual licence forebears , may appear many layers above and removed from the physical equipment and energy needed to make it work .
The promise of SaaS ( and cloud as a whole ) is that it fulfils the desire of IT organisations to abstract their own service provision away from the infrastructure layer . But if the enterprise is no longer managing the infrastructure then this falls to the SaaS provider to source – through building or buying – the data centres and power to deliver these applications .
The energy consumed by SaaS instances doesn ’ t usually surface as a consideration when selecting which SaaS platform to use ( at least not in the public domain ). But as the world focuses on reducing energy consumption and GHGs , this is likely to change .
How SaaS applications are powered has huge implications across the entire supply chain of utility companies , data centre providers and ultimately , end-users .
SaaS eating the enterprise world
The revenues in enterprise applications are expected to be around US $ 450 billion in 2020 and the market is expected to reach nearly US $ 500 billion in 2021 .
If we unpack this , an increasing share of the enterprise application market is going to be SaaS-based .

Who accounts for the economic and carbon cost of SaaS data centre power ?

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