Fundaments: Helping Enterprises in the Netherlands Decrease Their Carbon Footprints

With seven high-performance and high-security data centers located throughout the Netherlands and full array of cloud services and solutions, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that enables customers to harness the strengths of the private, public and hybrid cloud with ease, Fundaments is trusted by enterprises in numerous industries. The company is equally well-known among independent software vendors for its cloud platform and mission-critical business and e-commerce applications.

Recently, Fundaments became the first provider of VMware Cloud Verified solutions and services to earn the VMware Sovereign Cloud distinction. Now the company has joined the elite rank of partners to join VMware’s Zero Carbon committed initiative. This effort is one that Fundaments’ Chief Technology Officer Larik-Jan Verschuren says is important to him personally.

“The changing climate is clearly visible in our day-to-day lives,” he says. “We must make a collective effort to get energy consumption down.” He stresses the need to view this effort not just as it relates to the impact of global warming on people and businesses today, but on future generations. For Verschuren, who has two young kids, that’s a significant motivator.

“I want them to have a promising future, to enjoy our beautiful world, and to enjoy the simple pleasure of skiing,” he says. “We must set the stage to lower emissions, set the right example and educate others. The more we do now, the more future generations can do to improve these kinds of initiatives.”

Verschuren is quick to note that being environmentally friendly and genuinely dedicated to efforts that minimize reliance on fossil fuels is also good business. Enterprises, he says, increasingly want to partner with organizations that make it easy for them to immediately decrease their carbon footprints.

It made good sense to partner with VMware in the effort to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Not only is the Fundaments IaaS based on VMware technologies, but the company’s wide array of cloud offerings such as Backup-as-a-Service, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, and Security-as-a-Service draw on many VMware innovations, for example Kubernetes clusters based on VMware Tanzu.

“Fundaments’ own Carbon footprint is in the datacenters, so we make sure that everything we do within them is done in the most efficient way,” explains Verschuren. “Joining the VMware Zero Carbon Committed Initiative provides a clear statement about our commitment to the environment in a concrete format.”

Not only has Fundaments committed to run all of its data centers off of renewable sources of energy for a net Zero Carbon footprint by 2030, but it also has a number of initiatives on tap for 2023.

These include steering all of its data centers to an even great PUE level, completing the energy use labeling of its services, mapping the power used per gigabyte of RAM and decreasing it, reducing the percentage use of spinning disks in the terabytes of storage it sells, using only the most efficient hardware and creating more cold and hot corridors in data centers to decrease heating and cooling requirements.

Fundaments employees are also committed to dramatically decreasing the use of paper in the company’s offices, encouraging the use of electric vehicles, implementing car-free working days, decreasing the use of shipping and freight services, and minimizing corporate travel.

Learn more about Fundaments and its partnership with VMware here.