Member Stories
How our members are making software greener
Real stories of the standards, tools, and practices GSF member organisations built together — and the problems that drove them to act.
Member Story
"Cloud providers have only released carbon data to customers on a monthly basis, with delays of a few months"
How Adrian Cockcroft, Pindy Bhullar of UBS, and a working group including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS built the Real Time Cloud standard — the first specification requiring cloud providers to share real-time energy and carbon data in a common format, ratified April 2025 after 21 months of biweekly collaboration.
April 2025
RTC ratified — 21 months from launch to standard
3
Major cloud providers aligned — Azure and GCP co-authored the standard; AWS responded to disclosure requests
Member Story
"Engineers know the theory but not what to change in code"
How NTT DATA, Goldman Sachs, Accenture, AVEVA, and contributors from 11 organisations built the Green Software Patterns catalogue — a peer-reviewed library of actionable techniques for reducing software emissions, with measurable before-and-after impact.
50
Patterns published in the initial catalogue covering AI, Cloud, and Web
~4%
Carbon reduction demonstrated from a single pattern in a controlled test
Member Story
"How do you measure a website's carbon footprint?"
How Chris Adams of the Green Web Foundation and 14 assembly members from across the industry are building SCI for Web — a standard for measuring website carbon intensity that covers the full delivery chain: servers, networks, third-party services, and end-user devices.
10 weeks
From blank page to consensus design document through AI-assisted assembly
14
Assembly members from 15 organisations — tech giants, data providers, academics, and practitioners
Member Story
"How do you measure AI's carbon footprint?"
How 20+ partner organisations came together to build the SCI for AI — the first consensus-based standard for measuring the carbon footprint of AI systems across their entire lifecycle.
20+
Organisations participated in the workshops shaping the specification
11
Months from Proposal to Ratification
Member Story
"How do you measure software's carbon footprint?"
How Abhishek Gupta, Henry Richardson, Navveen Balani, and contributors from across the industry built the Software Carbon Intensity specification — a rate-based metric that became ISO 21031:2024 and is now used by banks, consultancies, and infrastructure operators to baseline and reduce their software emissions.
ISO
The SCI achieved ISO 21031:2024 status — an internationally recognised standard
7+
Independent implementations with published results across banking, consulting, and infrastructure
Member Story
"Measurement is too hard for non-specialists"
How Accenture, Microsoft, Amadeus, NTT DATA, and partners built the Impact Framework — an open-source tool that democratises software carbon measurement — and validated it through two global hackathons that together drew 900+ participants.
500+
Participants at Carbon Hack 24
47
Project submissions at Carbon Hack 24
Member Story
"Our engineers don't know how to build green software"
How Sarah Hsu of Goldman Sachs, Chris Lloyd-Jones of Avanade, and GSF members worldwide built and scaled the Green Software Practitioner course — now completed by over 130,000 engineers across the industry.
130,000+
Engineers who have completed the Green Software Practitioner course
50,000+
Trained in under a year at launch
Member Story
"Our pilots work but nothing scales across the org"
How Pindy Bhullar, Sean O'Keefe, and contributors from seven GSF member organisations built SOFT — the Sustainable Organisational Framework for Technology — the first ratified framework for embedding green software practices across an entire organisation.
4
Operational domains — Strategy, Implementation, Operational, Compliance
100+
Ready-to-use templates — from governance structures to carbon calculations — accelerate your implementation
Member Story
"Standards move too slowly for our regulatory timeline"
How GSF used an AI-assisted assembly process to bring 14 experts from 15 organisations to consensus in ten weeks — a process that previously took years — proving a new model for accelerating green software standards development as regulations tighten.
10 weeks
From blank page to consensus design document — compared to multi-year traditional standards timelines
14
Expert participants from 15 organisations reaching consensus through the AI-assisted process
Member Story
"The biggest companies in the world were independently solving the same problem"
How Jeff Sandquist of Microsoft, Sanjay Podder of Accenture, Erica Brescia of GitHub, and leaders from Thoughtworks and Goldman Sachs discovered they were working on the same problem — and founded the Green Software Foundation to solve it together.
5
Founding organisations — Microsoft, Accenture, GitHub, Thoughtworks, and Goldman Sachs
70+
Member organisations spanning technology, consulting, financial services, and academia
Member Story
"We can't shift workloads to clean energy"
How Microsoft, UBS, Avanade, NTT DATA, and partners built the Carbon Aware SDK — the first open-source toolkit for carbon-aware computing, now deployed on production banking systems and graduated from the Green Software Foundation.
13–24%
Carbon reductions demonstrated at CarbonHack22
395
Participants at CarbonHack22 across 51 projects
Member Story
"We don't know what legislation is coming"
How the Green Software Foundation built the Policy Radar — a shared, transparent tool tracking forthcoming green software legislation — and established the Policy Working Group as the connective tissue between technical expertise and policy action.
11
Global policies and regulations tracked across jurisdictions
3
Formal consultation responses coordinated across the foundation