“More and more companies are looking for solutions and considering strategies to commit to being carbon neutral or even carbon negative as governments and other industry organisations work globally to address the urgent carbon crisis. Romanian companies are no exception, especially since we have become a large software exporter and we want to align ourselves with global trends", says Șerban Țîr, Managing Director of Thoughtworks Romania.

Romania’s IT industry is one of the fastest-growing ones in Central and Eastern Europe. As of 2020, the local ICT market was estimated at $6.4 billion. According to a study by ANIS (Asociația Patronală a Industriei de Software și Servicii), IT exports account for 85% of this value ($5.5 billion). Almost half of the total revenue ($2.9 billion) comes from large companies with more than 250 employees, followed by small companies (under 50 employees) contributing $2.2 billion, and mid-size companies (50-249 employees) bringing in $1.3 billion.

Today, Romania is one of the leading countries in the region in terms of ITO, SSC, and BPO. Major global companies have opened centres in Romania for R&D, business services, logistics, custom software development, etc.

So, with a massive international presence in the local market, it is only natural for the IT market in Romania to align with the green tech movement.

Technology is in a constant process of development, and modern applications are almost always implemented on cloud. The exponential growth of cloud-based services has led to the rapid expansion of power-hungry data centres. Today, data centres consume about 1% of global electricity, and estimates show that by 2025, data centres will consume 1/5 of the world’s power supply, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

Sustainability and responsibility being the intrinsic values of the company since its foundation, Thoughtworks has now in its portfolio all the necessary tools for transitioning to green technology.

Since one of the main goals of Thoughtworks is to support businesses in the transition to green tech, the company has co-founded, together with others majors players in the tech industry, the non-governmental organisation Green Software Foundation, whose mission is to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tools, and best practices to develop technology and sustainable software.

In addition, Thoughtworks has an open-source Cloud Carbon Footprint solution in its portfolio that enables organization with sustainability metrics about their cloud infrastructure usage. Thus, sustainability is incorporated into the cloud strategy to significantly reduce the impact on the environment, and at the same time bring low costs to organizations.

“Sustainability and information technology converge to address emergent organizational and business needs. Thoughtworks understands this industry aspect and makes it part of our tech excellence culture. In doing so, we enhance our value proposition for clients and partners and responsibly do our part in one of the biggest challenges of our time”, says Daniel Fratte, software engineer and green tech advocate, Thoughtworks Europe.

The transition to green tech globally would bring major positive changes to the environment, while driving business and organization value upwards. The most active countries leading the way toward cleaner technology, where Thoughtworks is also present, are Finland, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

According to Reportlinker data, the global green data centre market is expected to grow to more than $58 billion in 2022, an increase of more than 19% from last year, when it recorded a value of $48.63 billion. Estimates indicate for the year 2026 a major advance in the global market, heading towards total value of 120.26 billion dollars.