HPE Discover Barcelona 2023 | John Frey | HPE & Chiara Selvetti | Atea

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John Frey

Chief Technologist, Sustainable Transformation

HPE

Chiara Selvetti

Director Sustainable Business Atea Group

Atea

How Atea and HPE are pioneering eco-friendly digital transformation

In today’s business landscape, it is crucial for companies to prioritize sustainability by embracing digital transformation. And artificial intelligence is now a major piece of the puzzle.By adopting sustainable practices, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises can enhance their competitiveness and appeal to customers and investors who prioritize these values

play_circle_outline Sustainability in Technology and IT Infrastructure: Atea's Role as HPE's Channel Partner in Nordic Region

play_circle_outline The Role of Leadership and Board Involvement in Driving Sustainability: Examining EU Energy Efficiency Directive and Science-Based Target Setting

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John Frey | HPE & Chiara Selvetti | Atea

John Frey

Chief Technologist, Sustainable Transformation HPE

Chiara Selvetti

Director Sustainable Business Atea Group Atea

search

(dramatic music fades) (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live ongoing coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona 2023. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. This is day two for us. This is our fourth set of guests. We're keep going.

>> Absolutely. Great energy here today. And I think very timely discussions as well.

>> Yeah. >> So I think this is really excited about this one. I think, you know, again, it's one of these with COP 28 going on, just starting out in Dubai. This is, you know, very timely.

>> To talk

about sustainability. >> To continue talking about,

yes, exactly. >> Absolutely. Well, I want to introduce our next guest. We have Chiara Selvetti. She is the Director of Sustainable Business at Atea. Welcome.

>> Thank you.

>> And John Frey, who's many, a many-time CUBE alum. Welcome back to theCUBE, Chief Technologist Sustainable Transformation at HPE. Welcome.

>> Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.

>> Chiara, I want to start with you, tell our viewers a little bit about Atea and what your sustainability challenges are.

>> Absolutely. So, Atea is a channel partner of HPE and other leading technology companies. And what we do is that we bring solutions to public sector customers and private sector customers in the Nordics to help them manage their IT infrastructure, to help them get this data to turn into insights, and therefore drive their strategies. And of course to help them manage the workplace of their employees so that the employees become very efficient. And my role is to integrate decarbonization thinking, circular economy thinking, and human rights and business thinking into our business. So, I work a lot with our business lines and developing the offering. And I talk a lot to customers. And that's what I think makes us a little bit unique because we sit at the interface of the great technology that HPE provides and how our customers are going to implement it and use it.

>> Well, I want to hear from both of you about what exactly you're hearing from customers. John, what are sort of the things that keep your customers up at night as they drive toward greater efficiency and net zero?

>> Yeah, I think it's, where do you start? Where do you get guidance? 'Cause sustainable IT is a topic that's not taught in universities. So, the next wave of people that are going to be running these infrastructures aren't taught about efficiency academically. It's not been a topic you could even buy a book on. So, most people that are in this space have learned by doing, which is one of the reasons that HPE writes the white papers and writes customer workbooks to help them on the journey. So, it's really get a sustainable IT strategy as part of your digital transformation strategy. Get it up at the managerial level 'cause it is a senior level conversation. Boards are starting to get asked, institutional investors are asking, CEOs are getting asked. So, CIOs are getting these requests and they're not sure in some cases how to respond to them. So that's, don't reinvent the wheel, learn from others that have been doing it, and let's keep the momentum going.

>> Yeah, I think it's really just, I mean, beyond sustainability that we've been talking about all week, it's AI. And I think AI, see, and again, being a technologist and really having a penchant for sustainability, I look at it and go, AI seems like one of the least sustainable technologies ever. I mean, you know, especially chat bots and stuff like that. But I, you know, when we had Taiga on and others and we talked through it. What are you telling customers about how they address AI and the sustainability about it?

>> And there's a key question. So, there are two questions about AI. The one is the what and the other one is the how. The how is all around sort of the sustainable IT implication what you mentioned. How do you make sure that AI itself is as sustainable as possible? But the biggest question of it all is how are you going to use it? Because if you're using it to actually drive sustainability, to align your company business strategy to your net zero strategies, and using sustainability to power that, then you can pretty much, it's a fairly easy calculation. You can outweigh some of the costs with the massive benefits that you're going to bring about for your decarbonization trajectory, right? But then at the same time, as we were saying, you need to make sure that you manage that AI in a sustainable way because the challenges are real. You're talking about a much more complex technology, a much more advanced technology. And you know, all of the inputs that are, that we've been talking about for years in the Nordics around sustainable IT, so the embedded carbon, the water, the minerals, the energy efficiency, they become like maximized with AI.

>> Yeah, it's funny because ChatGP, there was a study done and ChatGPT for every five prompts is 16 ounces of water. It blew my mind

when I heard that. >> Ow.

>> And I was like, this to your point, I mean it's not just the power aspect of it, it's the whole everything that goes into it. What are the conversations you're having with customers around that?

>> Yeah, it's really the same conversations. It's both how do we shift from thinking about optimizing the infrastructure, the hardware and the data center, to now we have to think about data efficiency and software efficiency. Are the training sets of data that we're going to use to train the model right? Do they have inherent bias in them or have we taken data out and really strived to make the training sets unbiased? Then it's the hardware that it takes to run that training set. And how long does it have to run? Even the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 is an order of magnitude of the number of GPUs that it took to process and the time that it took to process. So, you're thinking, Uptime Institute suggests that we are adding three gigawatts of continuous load onto the grid over the next two years just for training. And then you have companies that have historically not operated high performance computing devices now looking at that because that's what it takes to train, or like HPE GreenLake for large language models, they're leasing or renting that capability from vendors like HPE to do that. But you're not done, the model's just trained, now you have to do the inference and get the value. So, it's that conversation. And then as Chiara suggested, too, what's the value return you're going to get by using AI? And does that outweigh the environmental footprint of the technology? And if it's environmental footprint to environmental hand print, you can do that equation pretty easily. But if it's environmental footprint to societal benefit, if you save 100,000 lives, how much more beneficial than say a megawatt of power consumption is that, and how do you make that balance?

>> These are really complex questions and really hard questions. So, do you have a framework or a way that you help companies and clients think through these things? Because I don't even know if there are right answers, frankly.

>> Yeah. >> I mean, wow.

>> And that's exactly right. You need to think through those questions. And that's where the AI and sustainability conversation belongs in the boardrooms. It belongs in the leadership teams 'cause you need to start by aligning those goals. And then once you've done that, then you need to start by saying, "Oh, well how much competence do we need to bring in a different level of the organization to think through those questions?" But also how do we bring people excited about this? 'Cause I think, you know, there is an aspect of it which, you know, people might be a little bit scared and wary about, okay, well how is this this going? And if you involve your people, if you involve the right people in the organization at an early on phase, then you can do hackathons. You can do, you know, you can brainstorm about, okay, how are we thinking about this problem? Can we solve it with AI? In what way can we solve it about AI? And then I think that there is also the other part of the equation is the guidance that exists around sustainable IT. And thank God we are not starting from scratch, as you said. You know, we are applying it to slightly, well, to more challenges

essentially. >> Yep.

>> But we are not starting from scratch. And there is a lot of thinking that has been going on. And so I think don't reinvent the wheel is a really good parameter and learn from people that have already done it. That's how we operate, for example. We create a network of practice among customers that can actually learn from each other about how do you apply sustainable IT? How do you set up a sustainable IT strategy? And so on. So, that is one way of doing it.

>> Do you see a lot of customers getting together on that and in from a community perspective? Because I think that is the key is that, 'cause if I, and I've talked to people and I'm like, you know, HPE, their 20, you know, net zero 2040, they've pulled it in 10 years. They're looking at, and they put out, you know, all of their scopes, you know, all of the categories within Scope 3 for instance. It's, there's a transparency to that. Do you, is it a combination between HPE and the customer groups and are they getting together and talking about this and?

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I like to say partnership is leadership. That's how you get it done. So, back to the framework question, you asked is there a framework? We've developed one as HPE because one didn't exist. And we started with equipment efficiency, energy efficiency, and resource efficiency. We've talked about that on other CUBE videos over time. But because Atea brings together groups of technology professionals and technology purchasers, two years ago we added our fourth lever to that because we saw this need coming, software efficiency. And we just released that white paper for customers this month. And then last year at Atea's event, we launched our fifth, data efficiency. So, how do we, rather than building a solution and then figuring out how to make it efficient, how do we think about the business challenge or opportunity we're trying to solve in the first place? And then think about the data from the AI training sets or the data that we intend to collect to get insights from so that we're thinking intensely about that from the beginning? So, that's a great example of how the communities come together and shared best practices to help us all accelerate.

>> And I think the key word there is the ecosystem. So, we are all part of an ecosystem and, you know, from the buyer side to the channels to the technology leading company to your own suppliers, if we actually get together and figure out some of these issues together, then we can actually make a difference across the value chain. And that's exactly the space that we want to operate given the particular position in this ecosystem that we have. So, every year you mentioned our conference, we bring together about 600 IT decision makers and sustainability professional and procurement professionals to actually think through some of these issues and share best practices. And with that they can also send a very clear message back to the industry about what their expectations are. Something that gives me quite a lot of hope in this is that about 4 out of 10 of CIOs that we actually interact with, they're already thinking about bringing in IT expertise and solutions that can help customers and citizens reduce their emissions. So, that's pretty cool.

>> Chiara and John, both of you have made the point that this is really a leadership strategy question. It's not, sustainability can't be a siloed part of HR or something like that. This really needs to be part of the board conversation, the CEOs. What are the implications of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive? And how are CEOs thinking about that?

>> Yeah.

>> I'll start with you, yeah.

>> CIOs are thinking about that and they need to because they need to realize that it's their mandate and responsibility to have that strategy at their level. They need to think about three things. The first one is to think about their materiality. So, what is important for them for this setup they have, for the type of infrastructure they have, the type of data strategy they have, and figure out what matters. Then they need to set up a framework internally. And that framework is all about connecting the right people in the organization 'cause the CIO alone is not going to do it. The sustainability alone is not going to do it. They need to bring the people together. And the third one is actually finding the right guidance and the right partner that is going to help them to implement and measure, and especially measurement. Because the measurement part is what differentiates this sort of regulation from the non-regulatory and the sort of voluntary schemes that we've had before. Now you need to prove that you've done your homework and you need to prove that you're actually implementing the measures to achieve your goals.

>> And is a lot of it like science-based oriented? Is that what you're recommending is that they-?

>> Absolutely.

>> And 'cause I think again with, we were talking to the OpsRamps folks and the sustainability dashboard, is it where procurement and CIOs and CEOs are saying, "Hey, we need to see this strategy, that has to be a requirement as we go out and procure the gear to go and do AI", for instance. Is that what you're recommending to those customers?

>> Absolutely. Setting science-based target and asking for your suppliers to set science-based target is a core, it's at the core of it all. But actually also not only set the targets, also weigh those targets into your procurement decision. Because unless you put your money where your mouth is, nothing is going to really happen. And then the third piece is to actually ask for measurable reductions in CO2, because everybody's setting targets today. The trick part is to actually reduce the emissions.

>> Yeah and frankly, there's a fair amount of skepticism on many climate commitments that have been made around the world. Are the companies serious? Do they actually have a plan to execute on them? And frankly, some of them don't appear to have much scientific basis. And part of what those regulations are going to do is all of a sudden you're going to be reporting carbon emissions under the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive or a variety of data center metrics under the Energy Efficiency Directive that are need to be auditable, verifiable. So, that's really going to strengthen and reinforce climate commitments and companies that have never made them historically are going to start making them as well. That's all good. Bringing clarity, bringing specificity enables everyone to be on the same sheet of music as it were to help drive this progress.

>> Well that's a great note to end on. John, Chiara, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, a really fascinating

and relevant conversation. >> Thank you for having us.

>> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> Thank you for having us.

>> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona 2023. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech enterprise coverage. (upbeat music)

>> This-

John Frey | HPE & Chiara Selvetti | Atea

search

(dramatic music fades) (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live ongoing coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona 2023. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. This is day two for us. This is our fourth set of guests. We're keep going.

>> Absolutely. Great energy here today. And I think very timely discussions as well.

>> Yeah. >> So I think this is really excited about this one. I think, you know, again, it's one of these with COP 28 going on, just starting out in Dubai. This is, you know, very timely.

>> To talk

about sustainability. >> To continue talking about,

yes, exactly. >> Absolutely. Well, I want to introduce our next guest. We have Chiara Selvetti. She is the Director of Sustainable Business at Atea. Welcome.

>> Thank you.

>> And John Frey, who's many, a many-time CUBE alum. Welcome back to theCUBE, Chief Technologist Sustainable Transformation at HPE. Welcome.

>> Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.

>> Chiara, I want to start with you, tell our viewers a little bit about Atea and what your sustainability challenges are.

>> Absolutely. So, Atea is a channel partner of HPE and other leading technology companies. And what we do is that we bring solutions to public sector customers and private sector customers in the Nordics to help them manage their IT infrastructure, to help them get this data to turn into insights, and therefore drive their strategies. And of course to help them manage the workplace of their employees so that the employees become very efficient. And my role is to integrate decarbonization thinking, circular economy thinking, and human rights and business thinking into our business. So, I work a lot with our business lines and developing the offering. And I talk a lot to customers. And that's what I think makes us a little bit unique because we sit at the interface of the great technology that HPE provides and how our customers are going to implement it and use it.

>> Well, I want to hear from both of you about what exactly you're hearing from customers. John, what are sort of the things that keep your customers up at night as they drive toward greater efficiency and net zero?

>> Yeah, I think it's, where do you start? Where do you get guidance? 'Cause sustainable IT is a topic that's not taught in universities. So, the next wave of people that are going to be running these infrastructures aren't taught about efficiency academically. It's not been a topic you could even buy a book on. So, most people that are in this space have learned by doing, which is one of the reasons that HPE writes the white papers and writes customer workbooks to help them on the journey. So, it's really get a sustainable IT strategy as part of your digital transformation strategy. Get it up at the managerial level 'cause it is a senior level conversation. Boards are starting to get asked, institutional investors are asking, CEOs are getting asked. So, CIOs are getting these requests and they're not sure in some cases how to respond to them. So that's, don't reinvent the wheel, learn from others that have been doing it, and let's keep the momentum going.

>> Yeah, I think it's really just, I mean, beyond sustainability that we've been talking about all week, it's AI. And I think AI, see, and again, being a technologist and really having a penchant for sustainability, I look at it and go, AI seems like one of the least sustainable technologies ever. I mean, you know, especially chat bots and stuff like that. But I, you know, when we had Taiga on and others and we talked through it. What are you telling customers about how they address AI and the sustainability about it?

>> And there's a key question. So, there are two questions about AI. The one is the what and the other one is the how. The how is all around sort of the sustainable IT implication what you mentioned. How do you make sure that AI itself is as sustainable as possible? But the biggest question of it all is how are you going to use it? Because if you're using it to actually drive sustainability, to align your company business strategy to your net zero strategies, and using sustainability to power that, then you can pretty much, it's a fairly easy calculation. You can outweigh some of the costs with the massive benefits that you're going to bring about for your decarbonization trajectory, right? But then at the same time, as we were saying, you need to make sure that you manage that AI in a sustainable way because the challenges are real. You're talking about a much more complex technology, a much more advanced technology. And you know, all of the inputs that are, that we've been talking about for years in the Nordics around sustainable IT, so the embedded carbon, the water, the minerals, the energy efficiency, they become like maximized with AI.

>> Yeah, it's funny because ChatGP, there was a study done and ChatGPT for every five prompts is 16 ounces of water. It blew my mind

when I heard that. >> Ow.

>> And I was like, this to your point, I mean it's not just the power aspect of it, it's the whole everything that goes into it. What are the conversations you're having with customers around that?

>> Yeah, it's really the same conversations. It's both how do we shift from thinking about optimizing the infrastructure, the hardware and the data center, to now we have to think about data efficiency and software efficiency. Are the training sets of data that we're going to use to train the model right? Do they have inherent bias in them or have we taken data out and really strived to make the training sets unbiased? Then it's the hardware that it takes to run that training set. And how long does it have to run? Even the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 is an order of magnitude of the number of GPUs that it took to process and the time that it took to process. So, you're thinking, Uptime Institute suggests that we are adding three gigawatts of continuous load onto the grid over the next two years just for training. And then you have companies that have historically not operated high performance computing devices now looking at that because that's what it takes to train, or like HPE GreenLake for large language models, they're leasing or renting that capability from vendors like HPE to do that. But you're not done, the model's just trained, now you have to do the inference and get the value. So, it's that conversation. And then as Chiara suggested, too, what's the value return you're going to get by using AI? And does that outweigh the environmental footprint of the technology? And if it's environmental footprint to environmental hand print, you can do that equation pretty easily. But if it's environmental footprint to societal benefit, if you save 100,000 lives, how much more beneficial than say a megawatt of power consumption is that, and how do you make that balance?

>> These are really complex questions and really hard questions. So, do you have a framework or a way that you help companies and clients think through these things? Because I don't even know if there are right answers, frankly.

>> Yeah. >> I mean, wow.

>> And that's exactly right. You need to think through those questions. And that's where the AI and sustainability conversation belongs in the boardrooms. It belongs in the leadership teams 'cause you need to start by aligning those goals. And then once you've done that, then you need to start by saying, "Oh, well how much competence do we need to bring in a different level of the organization to think through those questions?" But also how do we bring people excited about this? 'Cause I think, you know, there is an aspect of it which, you know, people might be a little bit scared and wary about, okay, well how is this this going? And if you involve your people, if you involve the right people in the organization at an early on phase, then you can do hackathons. You can do, you know, you can brainstorm about, okay, how are we thinking about this problem? Can we solve it with AI? In what way can we solve it about AI? And then I think that there is also the other part of the equation is the guidance that exists around sustainable IT. And thank God we are not starting from scratch, as you said. You know, we are applying it to slightly, well, to more challenges

essentially. >> Yep.

>> But we are not starting from scratch. And there is a lot of thinking that has been going on. And so I think don't reinvent the wheel is a really good parameter and learn from people that have already done it. That's how we operate, for example. We create a network of practice among customers that can actually learn from each other about how do you apply sustainable IT? How do you set up a sustainable IT strategy? And so on. So, that is one way of doing it.

>> Do you see a lot of customers getting together on that and in from a community perspective? Because I think that is the key is that, 'cause if I, and I've talked to people and I'm like, you know, HPE, their 20, you know, net zero 2040, they've pulled it in 10 years. They're looking at, and they put out, you know, all of their scopes, you know, all of the categories within Scope 3 for instance. It's, there's a transparency to that. Do you, is it a combination between HPE and the customer groups and are they getting together and talking about this and?

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I like to say partnership is leadership. That's how you get it done. So, back to the framework question, you asked is there a framework? We've developed one as HPE because one didn't exist. And we started with equipment efficiency, energy efficiency, and resource efficiency. We've talked about that on other CUBE videos over time. But because Atea brings together groups of technology professionals and technology purchasers, two years ago we added our fourth lever to that because we saw this need coming, software efficiency. And we just released that white paper for customers this month. And then last year at Atea's event, we launched our fifth, data efficiency. So, how do we, rather than building a solution and then figuring out how to make it efficient, how do we think about the business challenge or opportunity we're trying to solve in the first place? And then think about the data from the AI training sets or the data that we intend to collect to get insights from so that we're thinking intensely about that from the beginning? So, that's a great example of how the communities come together and shared best practices to help us all accelerate.

>> And I think the key word there is the ecosystem. So, we are all part of an ecosystem and, you know, from the buyer side to the channels to the technology leading company to your own suppliers, if we actually get together and figure out some of these issues together, then we can actually make a difference across the value chain. And that's exactly the space that we want to operate given the particular position in this ecosystem that we have. So, every year you mentioned our conference, we bring together about 600 IT decision makers and sustainability professional and procurement professionals to actually think through some of these issues and share best practices. And with that they can also send a very clear message back to the industry about what their expectations are. Something that gives me quite a lot of hope in this is that about 4 out of 10 of CIOs that we actually interact with, they're already thinking about bringing in IT expertise and solutions that can help customers and citizens reduce their emissions. So, that's pretty cool.

>> Chiara and John, both of you have made the point that this is really a leadership strategy question. It's not, sustainability can't be a siloed part of HR or something like that. This really needs to be part of the board conversation, the CEOs. What are the implications of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive? And how are CEOs thinking about that?

>> Yeah.

>> I'll start with you, yeah.

>> CIOs are thinking about that and they need to because they need to realize that it's their mandate and responsibility to have that strategy at their level. They need to think about three things. The first one is to think about their materiality. So, what is important for them for this setup they have, for the type of infrastructure they have, the type of data strategy they have, and figure out what matters. Then they need to set up a framework internally. And that framework is all about connecting the right people in the organization 'cause the CIO alone is not going to do it. The sustainability alone is not going to do it. They need to bring the people together. And the third one is actually finding the right guidance and the right partner that is going to help them to implement and measure, and especially measurement. Because the measurement part is what differentiates this sort of regulation from the non-regulatory and the sort of voluntary schemes that we've had before. Now you need to prove that you've done your homework and you need to prove that you're actually implementing the measures to achieve your goals.

>> And is a lot of it like science-based oriented? Is that what you're recommending is that they-?

>> Absolutely.

>> And 'cause I think again with, we were talking to the OpsRamps folks and the sustainability dashboard, is it where procurement and CIOs and CEOs are saying, "Hey, we need to see this strategy, that has to be a requirement as we go out and procure the gear to go and do AI", for instance. Is that what you're recommending to those customers?

>> Absolutely. Setting science-based target and asking for your suppliers to set science-based target is a core, it's at the core of it all. But actually also not only set the targets, also weigh those targets into your procurement decision. Because unless you put your money where your mouth is, nothing is going to really happen. And then the third piece is to actually ask for measurable reductions in CO2, because everybody's setting targets today. The trick part is to actually reduce the emissions.

>> Yeah and frankly, there's a fair amount of skepticism on many climate commitments that have been made around the world. Are the companies serious? Do they actually have a plan to execute on them? And frankly, some of them don't appear to have much scientific basis. And part of what those regulations are going to do is all of a sudden you're going to be reporting carbon emissions under the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive or a variety of data center metrics under the Energy Efficiency Directive that are need to be auditable, verifiable. So, that's really going to strengthen and reinforce climate commitments and companies that have never made them historically are going to start making them as well. That's all good. Bringing clarity, bringing specificity enables everyone to be on the same sheet of music as it were to help drive this progress.

>> Well that's a great note to end on. John, Chiara, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, a really fascinating

and relevant conversation. >> Thank you for having us.

>> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> Thank you for having us.

>> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover Barcelona 2023. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech enterprise coverage. (upbeat music)

>> This-