- VMWare's chief operating officer, Sanjay Poonen, said he sees an opportunity for enterprise companies like his to set a better example amid the backlash against tech.
- His company is focused on reaching sustainability goals for 2020.
- "From the get-go, VMWare has been focused on building a sustainable data center by reducing a massive amount of carbon," Poonen said. "The whole proposition of virtualization is you can replace a ton of hardware with software."
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DAVOS, Switzerland - Big Tech is in the middle of a public relations crisis.
Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been barraged with controversies in the last year on issues from climate change to data privacy.
Some employees at these firms turned in their badges over defense contracts, while many others walked out to protest a company's handling of sexual misconduct claims or labor conditions.
The fallout could have consequences for companies hiring the next generation of engineers, designers, and product managers. College students aren't as interested in applying for Big Tech jobs as they once were, a trend detailed in a recent article in The New York Times.
Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer of VMWare, said he sees an opportunity for enterprise companies like his to set a better example amid the "techlash."
"I think a lot of the tech consumer backlash has come from consumer companies, B2C companies," Poonen told Business Insider at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "They collect massive amounts of data, they've been at the centers of controversies: privacy, election, all this kind of stuff ... We have an opportunity as a B2B company, not to say, 'Oh, we're different than them,' but to set a different standard for tech rising in a different way."
Tech as a 'force for good'
The publicly traded software company is working to establish technology as a "force for good," a phrase that appears everywhere on its website. It starts with the company's values: execution, passion, integrity, and a focus on customers and community. The last tenet, Poonen said, is baked into the company's core offering of virtual, or software-based, servers and storage.
"From the get-go, VMWare has been focused on building a sustainable data center by reducing a massive amount of carbon," he said. "The whole proposition of virtualization is you can replace a ton of hardware with software."
In 2015, the Palo Alto company pledged to reach carbon neutral emissions by this year, as part of a commitment to sustainability. It achieved that goal two years ahead of schedule, according to Poonen. It also promised to switch its global operations to 100% renewable energy and divert 90% of its waste from landfills, among other green goals.
Poonen said other tech companies in the valley are working to stave off the worst effects of global warming, naming Salesforce and Apple. In 2018, the customer-relationship management software company said it would lean on suppliers to reduce their carbon emissions, while raising its own targets, making the announcement at a major climate change conference in San Francisco that it sponsored that year.
"We just have to keep acting on words as opposed to just speaking on it," Poonen said. "And it's going to take time before the world thinks of tech differently."