I just got back from a raging day and a half at Dreamforce, the annual conference for Salesforce users, in San Francisco.

Now I know a Salesforce – or database – conference inherently sounds, well, a little boring. Hear me out.

ACE has 200,000+ contacts — that’s students, teachers, friends, funders — all around the country. We can’t contact all those people individually, as much as we’d like to – we’ve got to have systems in place to automate that. Also, we have educators in 10+ regions nationwide. Salesforce lets us contact and organize all those VIPs, with panache.

But here’s the kicker – Salesforce reduces ACE’s carbon emissions by 95%!

I know, sounds insane, too good to be true. But yesterday I spoke on a panel called Sustainability at Work: The Analytics of Efficiency in the Cloud, where we talked about a recent report that analyzed the carbon impact of using Salesforce as opposed to using a database or server at the office. In short, sharing is caring–by sharing a huge server with lots of other companies, we waste a lot less energy – to the tune of 95% less carbon emissions.

(Salesforce also developed a cool tool where you can figure out just how much carbon your company could save – check it out.)

As an organization that’s completely focused on reducing carbon emissions, it’s a thrill to say that we’re doing our part with our IT.

We have to manage all our data somehow, and doing it the green way motivates our staff, our partners, our students – and me!

Speaking of thrills, last night Metallica played Dreamforce. (Not so boring a conference after all, huh!?) I was a card-carrying member of the Metallica fan club back when ACE students were a glimmer in their parents’ eyes, and I can say authoritatively that they utterly dominated. Celebrate Metallica and sustainability with this rendition of “Blackened,” which was an early, post-apocalyptic song about environmentalism – and which Metallica rocked the house with last night.