Green Software & Sustainable Technology

The Challenge

The technology industry accounts for a growing share of global carbon emissions, yet most organisations have no visibility into the energy consumption of their software. Data centres, cloud computing, and the devices running applications all consume electricity, but the link between a line of code and its environmental impact remains invisible to most development teams. Without measurement, there can be no improvement.

The challenge extends beyond simple awareness. Even organisations committed to sustainability lack practical tools to quantify software energy use, compare the efficiency of different implementations, or make informed trade-offs between performance, features, and environmental cost. The emerging field of green software engineering needs both rigorous measurement methods and practical tools that developers can integrate into their daily workflows.

Our Approach

Digital Tactics has positioned green software at the core of its research and product strategy. Our approach combines direct energy measurement, software analysis, and international research collaboration to advance the state of the art in sustainable software engineering. We build tools that make energy consumption visible, quantifiable, and actionable for development teams.

At the technical level, we instrument software at the function and request level to capture real energy consumption data, correlating it with code changes, deployment configurations, and runtime conditions. We combine this with machine learning to predict energy impact before code is deployed, enabling proactive optimisation rather than reactive firefighting. Our participation in international research programmes ensures our methods are validated against the latest academic standards.

• Direct energy measurement at function and request level for granular consumption profiling
• ML-based prediction models enabling proactive energy optimisation before deployment
• International research collaboration validating methods against academic standards
• Developer-friendly tooling integrating energy awareness into existing CI/CD pipelines

Projects & Clients

GreenCode.ai is our flagship green software platform, providing automated energy measurement and optimisation recommendations for software projects. It combines runtime profiling with static analysis to give development teams a complete picture of their software's energy footprint. The PHP Energy product focuses specifically on measuring the energy consumption of PHP applications, one of the most widely deployed server-side languages in the world, providing benchmarking data that enables meaningful comparison and improvement.

The Kyma/Celtic Sea Hub project applies environmental data analysis to marine energy research, supporting evidence-based decisions about offshore renewable energy developments. At the research level, the GreenCode programme (part of the ITEA Eureka cluster) brings together international partners to develop standardised methods for software energy measurement. The GLEAM programme extends this work into the healthcare domain, investigating the energy and environmental impact of medical AI systems -- an increasingly critical consideration as AI becomes embedded in clinical workflows.

Results & Impact

• Active partner in 2 international green software research programmes (GreenCode ITEA, GLEAM)
• Commercial products (GreenCode.ai, PHP Energy) making energy measurement accessible to development teams
• Contributions to emerging standards for software energy measurement and carbon-aware engineering
• SME Climate Hub commitment backed by measurable action through tools and research