Environmental policy and reporting

We’ve set high levels of environmental standards for all areas of our business. Read our environmental policy to learn all about our sustainability guidelines. Our first sustainability report addresses our FY12 commitments and practices that are part of this effort to build a sustainable company and provide our customers with the resources and products to do the same.

Data center operations

Data center efficiency is at the heart of our sustainability strategy. By carefully considering our platform design and architecture, we can maintain small hosted footprints within data center facilities around the world. Our footprint is so small thanks to the efficiency of our multitenant platform and how we manage our data center operations.

We select our data center partners for their environmental and energy efficiency, and we closely monitor our data center performance and power usage effectiveness (PUE) to drive reductions. The power usage effectiveness ratio (PUE) is a measure of how efficiently a data center uses its power and has a significant impact on the overall carbon footprint. A PUE rating of 1.0 is equivalent to a 100% efficient facility. The typical data center has an average PUE of 1.8. In FY12, salesforce.com had a PUE of 1.47, far better than the industry average. We will continue to take measures to reduce our PUE across our data centers worldwide.

While we are widely recognized for the environmental efficiencies our multi-tenant technology model delivers, we know we can do more. We see the development of renewable sources of energy as an important part of our sustainability strategy, and we believe the cloud should be powered by clean sources of energy. That’s why we are committing to work to steadily increase the amount of renewable energy we use in our data center operations, to reach our goal to be fully powered by renewable energy. Read our full commitment.

Office buildings

We’ve embarked on a journey to minimize the environmental impacts—such as energy, water, and waste—in our office buildings. Our headquarters buildings are all Energy Star rated–indicating optimal performance. Recent global office build outs have achieved U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold CI certification. The LEED Green Building Rating System is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high-performance green buildings. We are proud to be the first software company to participate in the LEED Volume Program, which means that our future build outs worldwide will meet LEED Gold specifications.

Environmental footprint

We closely measure and analyze our global environmental performance to inform our reduction programs. We disclose our carbon emissions annually using the Investor Carbon Disclosure Project information request.