Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), recently discussed the growth of the company’s partnerships, including the energy industry, cloud technologies and energy transition, to remove Microsoft’s carbon emissions by 2050, IHS Markit reported Thursday.
Zander discussed Microsoft’s deployment of cloud-based apps that have powered work and commerce in the COVID-19 economy. He discussed the rapid resource mobilization in the COVID economy, stating, “We’ve had 200 million daily active participants.”
Microsoft’s cloud solutions have boosted productivity and expanded procurement exercises to integrate equipment, and the supply chains. Additionally, Microsoft cloud solutions have optimized business, industry and vaccine research.
“Think of some of the apps that we’ve actually published around being able to do things like track PPE. We have found several different cases where people were able to use the cloud programming platforms, create apps and get them deployed and get them up and running and used. (It) was very, very quick,” Zander stated.
Zander also discussed how COVID-19 has optimized the efficiencies of the cloud, noting that there has been an increase in demand for Microsoft’s offerings, even though the company experienced supply chain disruptions.
“The policy and investment side—it has never been more important for us to collaborate with healthcare, universities, and with others. We’ve kicked off a whole bunch of new partnerships and work that will benefit us in the future. This was a good wake up call for all of us in figuring out how to marshal and be able to respond even better in the future,” Zander added.
Zander also discussed Microsoft’s goal to go “carbon negative” by 2050. The company will begin to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by investing $1 billion in carbon removal technologies.
“We want to figure out how we build technology to help us do that and then we want to share that technology with others. And then all along the way we want to partner with energy companies so that we can all be partnering together on this energy transition,” Zander said.
