ESG policy
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) at Exellyn
Doing things right from an environmental perspective is embedded into our core business: circular was there from the beginning. Everything started with the ambition to re-use existing IT hardware assets. Nowadays, all Infinite Group subsidiaries contribute to end-to-end IT lifecycle solutions on a global scale. At the same time, being focused on diversity from day one has played an integral role in our ability to attract and retain talent and therefore our companies’ overall growth.
This document describes our views on ESG at the Infinite Group and how we strive for a positive impact across the environmental, social and governance domains.
Doing things right is and will continue to be subjective to a certain extent. To ensure we direct our efforts in such a way they have the most impact, we validate our actions and initiatives against the following framework:
- Big in scale: What’s the magnitude of this challenge? How much does it affect people’s lives today? How much effect will be solving it have in the long run?
- Solvable: How easy would it be to make progress on this problem? Is it within our reach and scope of influence to make a difference?
- Neglected: How many people and resources are already dedicated to tackling this problem? How well allocated are the resources that are currently being dedicated to the problem?
This forces us to focus on ESG beyond just our own internal organisation and consider our role within our greater ecosystem. What supplier relationships are allowing us to contribute positively, what can we do in turn for our customers.
Our role in our business inherently means we have no direct influence on manufacturing processes, nor can or do we want to dictate customers how to optimally use IT infrastructures from a sustainability perspective. But that doesn’t mean we can’t meaningfully contribute. Central to our dedication to contributing towards responsible and sustainable practices is our commitment to fostering strong vendor partnerships, supported by the establishment of a comprehensive Supplier Code of conduct and by making the ESG efforts of our suppliers visible and tangible to our customers. Just as we feel a strong sense of responsibility to our customers, we are equally committed to ensuring they are fully informed about the various options available to them to minimize their IT footprint. Whether they have formulated strict ESG requirements towards their supply chain or not.
And last but not least, we have a commitment to all of our current and future employees in providing a safe environment where they can grow and strive to make an impact, within and beyond our company.
Environmental
Sustainability is embedded into our business model. The digitization of society results in continued growth in the demand for digital services, which in turn is driving considerable energy consumption and associated carbon footprint. And given the importance of the global energy transition for the decades to come, we focus on various ways to support energy consumption and CO2 footprint reduction.
But different IT assets present vastly different value chains in footprint.
This effectively means supporting customers to reduce carbon footprint related to IT consumption cannot be achieved by a one-size-fits-all approach. For client devices, it makes most sense to ensure we maximize the lifecycle of every laptop or desktop, to avoid unnecessary manufacturing.
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Looking at datacentre compute stacks, one needs to carefully examine the options to build server clusters optimized on power consumption, simply because of the weight factor of usage. A fully populated rack cabinet with 1U rack servers with 2x 24 core CPUs provides just over 2000 cores and generates approx. 172 kg ton of CO2e over 3 years. But the latest generation of 2U, 4 node high-density architectures with 64 core AMD EPYC processors can provide the same amount of compute power requiring just 8U rack space and a power consumption equivalent to 121 kg ton CO2e. |
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Considering the examples above, we have identified three core areas to make a difference:
Circularity: maximize the lifecycle of every IT asset
Our focus on the lifecycle of IT infrastructure is designed to maximally utilize assets across their entire lifecycle. Every customer case is different. Some clearly benefit from adopting the latest generation of compute technology every two years. They require every inch of marginal gain in compute, bandwidth, or capacity to stay ahead of the game. Others are perfectly fine deploying previous generations of tech since it drastically reduces Capex investments. Such refurbished assets limit the environmental footprint as it extends the lifecycle of systems for multiple years.
Our BuyBack as-a-Service (BBaaS) services allow our customers to globally outsource decommissioning of obsolete IT infrastructure, allowing us to use our market expertise for your benefit through a centralized process. Where possible we reuse IT equipment and recycle what remains according to European laws & regulations. Recycling our certified disposal services ensure devices which have reached the true end of their economic life are recycled in order to re-use raw materials which once were transformed into a server or switch. Recycling is done according to WEEE and ISO-standards such as ISO 9001:2015.
Performance, Cost and Energy Efficiency Optimization
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data centre electricity use is estimated to be between 220 and 320 TWh, approx. 0.9 to 1.3% of global demand and similar to the total annual electricity consumption of the United Kingdom. With the continued growth in the demand for digital services, it’s incredibly important to focus on energy efficiency. Fortunately, IT energy efficiency gains are visible: between 2015 and 2021, global internet traffic is up 440%, data centre workloads grew +260%, however against a relatively moderate 60% energy use increase.
Today, we see different new IT solutions providing identical levels of performance demonstrate a double-digit difference in power consumption. Therefore, we actively bring such comparisons to customers, raising awareness and help estimating both potential cost and emission reductions. Our teams are trained and guided to ensure they are able to identify such optimizations in working with customers on a daily basis.
Optimizing Global Logistics
IT supply chains present a high degree of clustered manufacturing in regions such as Asia and Eastern Europe. It is therefore inevitable assets will travel a significant distance from the manufacturing country of origin to the location they will be used. Especially considering most of our customers operating at global scale. And while logistics only represent a limited percentage (6%) of the total carbon footprint throughout the life of an average laptop, it does provide various options for footprint reduction.
We aim to make sure customers are fully aware of various available transport modes, if only to ensure road, rail of sea freight are used in favour of air freight when possible. We also proactively aim to deploy new developments in packaging, whether it’s packaging from recycled materials or multi-packing options which greatly reduce the physical footprint of equipment heading to its destination.
Social
In recent years, it has been great to receive broad recognition for doing well in terms of diversity. Without this ever being an explicit focus or policy. Our success is built upon our extremely diverse, talented group of people. To continue this path, we need:
- to preserve and expand diversity which requires an inclusive organisation where everyone feels welcome;
- An organisation where everyone is able to make a true impact since that is what draws talented people.
For the Infinite Group, our +25 nationalities within a moderately sized organisation today plays a differentiating role. It plays an invaluable role given the global nature of our business. But it’s also a catalyst to recruit talent from all around the globe.
Every day, we emphasize the importance of our company culture. Key elements such as transparency and trust are crucial in unleashing the full potential of our workforce. The same applies to diversity across all teams. Over 40% of our entire organisation is female, every department has members from at least two continents or more.
To maintain all of the above, we need to ensure we make daily life in the office as fair, healthy, and enjoyable as possible. Making sure every team member is able to reach his/her full potential, we focus on three pillars:
- work / business / professional life
- private / personal life
- health
As an employer, we do not restrict ourselves in solely focusing on business life. Any aim to construct options in supporting employees to take care of themselves across all three pillars. To preserve and maintain our organisations DNA, culture and structure while continuing to grow, we are focused on making sure employees are happy, experience freedom to express themselves and actively search for their way to make personal impact to the organisation.
But social is not limited to just our organisation and its employees. In terms of a social contribution, we do not merely focus internally. As a result of our focus on the end-to-end lifecycle of IT infrastructure, we have established an Incubator Program for promising and ambitious Managed and Cloud Services Providers. Such organisations often present significant growth potential, though struggle with the financial complications or rapid expansion. And consequently, cannot just procure the latest and greatest in terms of infrastructure. Our Incubator Program is designed to feed decommissioned assets from larger corporate customers and extend its lifecycle, allowing tomorrow’s bright start-ups to re-use them and develop their business.
Governance
Our culture is focused on making sure every team member thinks independently rather than merely follows rules and regulations. We hire bright people who receive extensive guidance, support and training, it would be a waste of human capital to rigidly limit them. We share context for everyone to operate within, rather than policies and boundaries. That being said, certain topics require clarity above all. For those topics where compliance is simply not open to interpretation, we have established a Code of Conduct. This captures clear guidelines for every employee on how we expect every Group member to act on a daily basis towards stakeholders within and outside our organisation.
Our governance structure is designed to ensure compliance to various policies, such as:
- On business ethics.
- On general ethics (discrimination, harassment etc.)
- On information security (Data Privacy Policies, GDPR / AVG guidelines).
- On corruption (SOP + possible extension, KYC check).
- On fraud (SOP + possible extension, KYC check).
- On conflict of interest (SOP).
- On sensitive transactions (SOP)
To have compliance from the employees with the SOP:
- Documentation on training employees to prevent bribery, corruption.
Moving forward – validating our contribution
ESG fortunately has moved beyond the point of just being the next buzzword in business. There’s widespread consensus concerning businesses being required to reflect on their true impact, rather than just focusing on revenue growth or profitability improvement. Being part of society means more than that.
We can enthusiastically reflect on where we are today across all ESG axis. We are challenging ourselves to do more. However, not just based on our own standards and definition of doing the right thing. We will actively explore options to externally validate our efforts related to sustainability. We are developing means to accurately quantify CO2 reduction related to our focus areas. We are preparing for external audits and certification tracks to identify new potential to contribute. Our business may have embedded sustainability, we will also challenge our own internal operations end-to-end. But focused on true impact rather than inappropriately using ESG as a marketing tool. Or to allow ourselves to mark some environmental questions in customer RFPs containing an ESG chapter or questionnaire. Bottom line: we believe growing our business and organization can only be done in sustainable, meaningful way.
