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Sun, employees save big with Open Work
July 18, 2008 | Length: 00:03:00
In an age of high gas prices and global warming, businesses are trying to figure out how their employees can spend less time on the road and more time telecommuting. Sun Microsystems believes they've hit upon the answer with their 10-year-old Open Work platform. In this video, correspondent Sumi Das meets Dave Douglas, vice president of eco-responsibility, and finds out how the project operates and why it's been a success. According to Douglas, Open Work has had a strong financial and environmental impact, saving 68 million in real estate and energy costs and cutting carbon emissions by 29,000 tons in 2007.
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>> Sumi: In an age of high gas prices and global warming businesses are trying to figure out how their employees can spend less time on the road and more time telecommuting.
>> Dave: How do we grow through energy efficiency and make ourselves more profitable at the same time, so that's what we're --
>> Sumi: Dave Douglas, Sun Microcosm's Chief Green Evangelist believes the company hit upon the answer in 1998 when they created Open Work.
>> Dave: One of our biggest programs is our Open Work program that lets our employees work more flexibly from wherever.
>> Sumi: Whether it's at home or the local coffee shop Sun employees spend an average of 3 to 4 days a week out of the office but still connected through the company's network.
>> Dave: our motto of the company is the network is the computer and so the question is can't we use that as part of us letting our employees work from wherever makes sense on a given day.
>> Sumi: Employees can use this JAVE enabled identity card to access their data at one of the company's drop-in locations.
>> Ann: I had 15, 20 minutes --
>> Sumi: Ann Bamsberger assumed spelling is the Vice President in charge of Open Work. How do people use them?
>> Ann: Well I can give you an example for myself actually; this particular JAVA card will know that it's me and I can walk up to any one of these, I obviously don't own it, right, what I own is on the net and put in my card and very quickly it'll give me a prompt to tell me that the display is locked because it's secure, I give it my password which is what allows us our security, log on and boom it just pops up exactly where I left it. And then I can take this out again it'll shut down for anyone else who wants to come up and use it and I've just been productive even though I'm on my way between a destination with you and then a meeting.
>> Sumi: Since the program was started the financial impact has been significant. In 2007 the company saved $68 million in real estate and energy costs and the environment is getting a boost as well. Last year the program helped cut carbon emissions in the atmosphere by 29,000 tons with fewer employees commuting on the highway to work. Programs like Open Work have helped spur other Green initiatives at Sun from redesigning their data centers to developing new eco-friendly blade servers. Still Douglas says it's important not to get too caught up in the Green hype but instead to figure out how to measure Green against the bottom line.
>> Dave: And we've really tried to focus on numbers, on measurements and we found a lot of power in feeding those back into the employees letting them know, hey, when you guys turn off the lights it's actually made a difference here's how many kilowatts we've saved. We do the same thing with our customers here's how much power this server can save versus what you're doing today. We're trying to boil it down and just be honest with ourselves and not get caught up in the hype but instead focus on delivering real results.
>> Sumi: I'm Sumi Das reporting for BNET.
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