ClimateNerds – Mark Metz, NerdRabbit

This Is techstrong tv. Welcome back to techstrong tv. I'm Bonnie Schneider, sustainability contributor, and we are talking about the latest in technology and sustainability.

Joining us today is Mark Metz, founder and chairman of Nerd Rabbit. Mark is not only a technology veteran, he's a swimming enthusiast, a ping pong player, and a comic book collector. Mark is combining his passions to drive change within, within our industry.

His latest venture is climate nerds and innovative service that provides companies with sustainability specialists who audit their data centers, thus offering a clear view of their organization's carbon emissions, and more importantly, a roadmap on how to reducing them. Mark, I forgot to add that you're also a comedian and funny, so we do appreciate that here on Techstrong. So thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. I hope, I hope you don't ask me to, to give you some jokes, cause No, no, no, not at all. Actually, I'd like to start with a little bit more about your background and the inspiration behind Climate Nerds.

Absolutely. What, what would you like to know? Well, yeah, just a little bit about you and, and how did you get started with, uh, climate Nerds?

Why climate nerds even? Yeah. Well, um, I guess I'll go back to Nerd Rabbit in general.

So, nerd Rabbit is kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's nerds that are ready to hop on projects. And we kind of got the inspiration from Nerd Rabbit a few years ago.

We'd been in the IT business, also the staffing business. And when Covid hit, I started realizing that companies wanted technical people, consultants, engineers, architects to work when they needed them on demand. And there are a lot of other talent platforms out there, but there wasn't one that was specifically around helping companies move to the cloud.

And during covid that was also obviously a big initiative. So we combined those two things about people wanting to work anywhere with the demand for cloud for, uh, cloud. And we created Nerd Rabbit.

So it was kind of cloud talent, uh, that was available on demand. So over the last couple years we've started seeing and, and, uh, researching the sustainability advantages of moving to the cloud from a traditional data center. We actually, one of our sister companies called Rela Tech wrote a calculator that helps kind of give a, a broad estimate.

If you give us kind of what you have in your data center, we can real quickly tell you approximately what is the carbon footprint advantage of moving to a w s That kind of spawned the idea of climate nerds. Cuz a lot of customers ask, well, how accurate is this? You don't know exactly what we have, you haven't seen our data center.

And of course we would say, well, obviously it's just an estimate. So we launched Climate Nerds for those customers that didn't have full-time climate scientists on staff, which is most of our clients, and wanted to, uh, um, advance their sustainability message internally. So that was kind of the, the idea behind it.

Well, can you explain the process of how Climate Nerds works from, uh, the engagement to execution? Yes, and it's, it's exactly the same as the, the process to hire any one of other nerds for a project. So think of it as, I, I guess there's two possibilities or two ways that you can engage.

You might just need one person that has a sp a specific skillset that can start at a, a certain time for a, a fairly, fairly well defined project that you're gonna manage them. So maybe you just need, you know, once a year, maybe you, man you measure your carbon footprint for your business and you need one of our climate nerds to come to your data center and, and take some measurements and figure out exactly what you have and how much electricity you're consuming and maybe what is the carbon footprint. So you might post a project on our site and we have one of our climate nerds or many of them that might respond to that.

You can then interview one of those nerds and pick the one that you feel like has the skillset set that you need for your particular project. The other way you can engage our climate nerds is you want us to do everything you need a project done. So you're looking for a specific outcome and outcomes that we have kind of targeted are, I'd like to know my carbon footprint, I want a baseline for my data center, what exactly am I consuming?

So we have new nerves that can, you know, give you that output. The second thing is, I want recommendations. Can I reduce my carbon footprint?

And there are thousands of potential things that, uh, could help in a data center environment that one of our nerds might be able to help with. Um, a a third one might be, um, tell me what my carbon footprint savings would be for a particular application if I move, say my S SAP environment from an on-prem data center into AW Ws. And we might try to give a more accurate, uh, estimate of that.

Then that calculator that I described could do that is, you know, very quick. What are the technologies or methods that Climate Nerds uses to measure the carbon footprint of data centers? Um, that is a great question and there are a lot of potential answers to that one on how you might measure the carbon footprint.

And, but if you go back to what the model is, our model is that we provide climate experts on demand. You know, that's the first thing. Mm-hmm.

So we might be, we might be kinda, uh, merging into their specific methodology for measuring the carbon footprint of their data center, or we might even be coming up with it. And there are a lot of tools that, that can help do this. One of the things that we are often doing is we're going in and we are doing a complete inventory, if you will, of everything that is in a data center that has a carbon footprint.

And usually those things, you know, the, the, the biggest consumers of power in a data center are servers. Yeah. And big storage devices and then network appliances.

But that's only part of the picture. The bigger part of the picture is, well, that's pretty easy to measure. What is the, like electrical output, save a server that's in your data center.

The things that are often forgotten are, well, what was the carbon footprint of manufacturing that server? And what is the carbon footprint of disposing of that server? So we try to come up with that entire picture and look at scope two and Scope three emissions from that process.

And there are a lot of tools that can be in, uh, used to do that and might be beyond the scope of a 20 minute, uh, interview on this. Oh, that's fine. Uh, we can always take a, take a longer interview next time.

Um, now you mentioned kind of the inventory is a good place to start, um, and that, and that's a, a general blueprint blueprint of, of what you should do. But how do you kind of dig into each company's specific operational needs and, and make sure the climate nerds recommendations align with that? Yeah, so, um, operational needs.

So, uh, o often I think what we're talking about here is, you know, a company that has a desire to lower their carbon footprint and that's why we're gonna get engaged. And of course there's operational needs. We could tell 'em, well, the easiest thing to do is just unplug this data center and quit using it.

And I think that's what you're saying is that obviously they can't do that because their business, they would go wonder if they did that. So you have to look at things that make sense for the business, um, and can save carbon in the process. And that, that makes Sense.

That kind of all in idea that I just described, isn't that outlandish anymore to say, well, the best thing you can do is just close down this data center. Uh, because there are now technologies to move those applications to the cloud. And the advantage of the cloud, it's not just that it's scalable, it's always there, it's potentially more secure.

It's also substantially more sustainable because these, uh, cloud providers like Microsoft or AW W AWS or Google, they have these massive data centers that are designed to be far more efficient than most companies could ever produce on their own. Uh, they have, um, uh, and there's a way that data centers are measured. That's called A A P U E, um, that measures the efficiency of the data center.

It's basically how much power is being used by the stuff that's in it, the servers and the storage devices. And you compare that to the power that's used for everything else. Hair conditioning for example, and lights.

And, uh, surprisingly most data centers about, uh, 30 40% of the power is not even going to the IT equipment. And in these massive data centers run by the Googles and AWSs, virtually all of the power is going to the equipment. So they're much more efficient, number one.

Secondly, most of them use a much greater percentage of renewable energy than your average data center in the United States, certainly. Mm-hmm. And then finally, usually the products that are in the data center are more efficient because they're using the latest and greatest servers that are more efficient than what most companies use.

So you put all three of those things together and it comes with a pretty enormous carbon, um, savings that most companies can generate by exiting a data center and moving to the cloud. Some of our calculations that we've, we've done have shown a carbon footprint savings between 80 and 90%, moving from a traditional data center to the cloud. That's a big, uh, difference.

Are there any specific industry sectors or types of businesses that climate nerds is particularly well seated to assist? Yeah, absolutely. Uh, maybe not industries, but types of companies.

So the, a lot of the companies that we've been engaged with, you know, when you think about it, they're companies that have data centers. So it might be manufacturers, um, finance companies, retail, usually mid to large size enterprises, and usually companies that have been around for 20 or so years kind of before the cloud. So, you know, startup kind of environments, software is a service kind of environments aren't necessarily a great fit for our offering.

Cause we're usually targeting companies that either have their own data center or they have equipment that is in a data center, like a co-location center. So, um, and answer your question, it's fairly industry wide, but typically mid to large size companies that have data center environments. That makes sense.

Uh, well, you know, uh, I think a lot of people have heard of Nerd Rabbit, um, and that now coming into, um, this next climate portion, it, it definitely sh showcases your initiatives and, and values and sustainability. But a lot of the talk now, especially with Gen Z coming into the marketplace looking for jobs, um, how do you find that this sustainability approach has translated into your attracting and retaining talented professionals? It's, um, it's interesting.

It's a, a very positive byproduct what we've done. We didn't launch this thinking, wow, this will be a great way to attract talent. But we found that it is, I mean, it's a great, it's a, it's a great benefit and I, I think, you know, this Gen Z, they are looking for companies that are socially conscious, uh, and that have some sort of, uh, give back to society, if you will.

Certainly not harmful to society. And I think a lot of companies are realizing that it also is, uh, allowing for a much greater market opportunity for us as businesses are saying we need to be more sustainable. Part of their reason might be to attract and retain employees.

So we hope that we can, I guess, spread the message and help other companies be sustainable as well. Uh, so it's not, it wasn't really the purpose of why we did this, but it's been a awesome byproduct of what we're doing. That makes perfect sense.

And my last question is, uh, what's next for Nerd Rabbit and Climate Nerds? Um, and what's next for the both of these companies and also, um, in the realm of sustainability focused initiatives? So it's a great question.

Um, we think that this sustainability message is gonna just continue to grow, um, throughout corporate America. It's a stronger message today in other parts of the world, especially Europe, for example, where sustainability is top of mind on almost every large company. We think.

I certainly think that it will in the United States as well. And so our, uh, sustainability initiatives I think will continue. Uh, we're launching a few things now, both at Nerd Rabbit and at our sister company, rela Tech around those things.

So stay tuned. Love to get back on your show. And of those, um, one of the things that we're doing is we are rapidly enhancing this online calculator that we are providing to customers so that they can quickly get a, a broad estimate, I'd say, of what do we think your carbon footprint is and what do you think we could get it to if you move to the cloud?

So we're, we're putting a lot of investment into that, and then we're investing in the climate nerds that can help make that a reality. That's mm-hmm. I was gonna say, that's great.

And I, I appreciate what you said about how it's, um, top of mind in, in the European, uh, area areas versus the us but it's coming here. Uh, are you finding that in terms of attracting clients, that it's, it's kind of growing in from one direction to the other? We are, and a lot of our clients are actually international already, um, not based in Europe, but have offices in Europe or have, uh, based in Europe and have offices in the US and, but we, we've seen that, um, maybe partially because of that, that sustainability message is now coming really quickly in the United States as well.

Did that answer your question? It did. It just seems to be a common thread in, in a lot of the interviews we're doing on Techstrong tv.

So it was interesting to hear you say that as well. And I think, um, all these initiatives are great and, um, we'd love to have you back on, uh, to talk about, uh, what was the next project you said you're working on? Well, we are, we are about to release a new version of our, I'll call it our climate calculator, Climate calculator.

Mm-hmm. Um, a data center solution to quickly assess the carbon footprint of a data center environment automatically, if we can get an inventory of what's running in it. That sounds useful.

Yeah. That's great. Well, uh, mark Metz, founder and chairman of Nerd Rabid, um, and thank you so much for, for being here, um, and making a smile as well.

Um, really learned a lot about your company Climate Nerds, and we look forward to hearing more about what you're doing in the future. So thanks for being on Techstrong tv. Thank you, Bonnie.

Pleasure to meet you. All right. Well stay with us on Techstrong tv.

We're going to have a lot more coming up about sustainability and tech. We'll be right back.