Florida’s City of Clearwater is committed to enhancing the lives of its more than 117,000 residents while preserving the area’s rich culture and beautiful coastline. With that, the government organization acknowledges that sustainable practices help preserve the environment, improve community members’ health and can lead to economic benefits. And part of this work is to align its technology with its vision. 

In 2011, the city adopted its first Clearwater Greenprint, which describes its strategic vision to make Clearwater a vibrant community for current residents and future generations. Revised in 2021, the city’s Greenprint 2.0 is comprised of eight topic areas that help further the city’s aim to improve its citizen’s lives by reducing energy use and waste, creating local jobs, and improving public health to the benefit of Clearwater for years to come.

As part of this initiative, the community has already reduced its city-wide emissions by 12.9% through 2018, compared to its 2007 baseline year. Now it’s raising the bar with its 2035 goal to reduce them 25% versus 2007 levels.

“Clearwater Greenprint 2.0 isn’t just another plan collecting dust on a shelf — it’s our blueprint for a cleaner, smarter and more connected future. It’s how we’re rolling up our sleeves (in a sustainably made shirt, of course) to tackle clean energy, efficient systems and meaningful community action. Because building a better tomorrow doesn’t happen by accident — it happens with intention, innovation and a whole lot of heart.”
– Amy Sessions, Customer Service Division Manager, City of Clearwater

To further its efforts toward sustainability, the city partnered with Genesys to implement a cloud-based customer experience (CX) platform. One of the reasons the city chose the Genesys Cloud™  platform was because the technology aligns well with the Greenprint 2.0 topic area Green Energy and Buildings. Read more about the City of Clearwater and its transformation to Genesys Cloud.

Genesys Cloud is hosted on an energy efficient cloud infrastructure that can help organizations drive sustainable transformation while reducing their operational footprint. Genesys has achieved carbon neutrality1 for its overall Genesys Cloud operations for customers through continued expansion of access to more energy-efficient cloud services and investments in carbon credits to cover residual emissions.  

How a Cloud Platform Helps Reduce Emissions in CX

When workloads are hosted in a cloud platform versus an on-premises solution, organizations can keep total computation resources to a minimum. This helps to reduce energy requirements and related greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions from on-premises deployments are often much higher than those from comparable cloud deployments.

To illustrate, Amazon Web Services (AWS) found that companies can decrease carbon emissions by up to 99% when moving on-premises IT workloads to the cloud due to improved hardware and cooling efficiency, workload optimization and their investments in carbon-free energy.

The AI-powered Genesys Cloud platform is designed to align resources on demand, minimizing and avoiding idling processor capacity.

Genesys Cloud leverages autoscaling compute resources to balance workloads with variable demand. And we maintained a platform uptime of 99.998% for our fiscal year 2025 (Feb 1, 2024–Jan 31, 2025).

Sustainability at the Heart of Innovation

At Genesys, sustainability is fundamental to how we can drive measurable value for your business. It’s a mindful perspective we’ve embraced that reflects our responsibility to care for the environment for current and future generations.

This strategic approach empowers our business to address challenges and unlock opportunities to achieve sustainability goals. We’re validating our reduction strategy with the Science Based Targets initiative and have received consecutive Gold Medal recognitions from EcoVadis.

But it’s not all about us. We can accomplish so much more as a collective.

Together, we have the power to make strides toward a more sustainable future. That’s why we view sustainability with customers like the City of Clearwater as a long-term partnership that can drive positive impact across the entire business lifecycle.

Cloud solutions can offer advantages for sustainability-minded organizations that are still using on-premises deployments. The City of Clearwater is just one example of the power of partnership.

To learn more about how you can partner with Genesys to make progress toward your sustainability goals, visit us online.

1 Genesys calculates the annual emissions from the operations of Genesys Cloud based on the estimated annual emissions from Genesys Cloud AWS usage and its internal IT computing on AWS using the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, plus the estimated annual emissions of Genesys Cloud Edge devices which manage connections between phones, SIP trunks, telephony gateways, Genesys Cloud, and third-party systems. We apply carbon credits purchased from Rubicon Carbon against these annual emissions, resulting in a carbon-neutral footprint for our Genesys Cloud operations. ”Emissions from Genesys Cloud AWS usage“ include direct emissions from operations and indirect emissions from producing the electricity used to host Genesys Cloud. Emissions from all commercial agreement types (i.e., cloud, subscription and license) are included. Emissions from research and development performed on AWS platforms, such as development, testing and demo systems, are included. Emissions from electricity from use of third-party tools, hardware used by developers and upstream activities such as R&D-related travel are excluded. Emissions from reselling telecommunications services are excluded. Emissions from software integrations resulting from Genesys’ acquisitions are included once their systems are internalized on AWS.