A supplier questionnaire that asks for the carbon footprint of your messaging and voice traffic used to be answerable only with a shrug and a spreadsheet some analyst built once. On Devotel Orbit the answer is a screen: Insights → Sustainability shows the estimated CO2 equivalent of your outbound communications per channel over the window you pick, and a Download button produces a CSV you can attach to an ESG or procurement packet as-is.
There are two things worth being precise about, and this post spends its length on both. First, the estimate is per channel, and per-channel detail is what makes the number defensible rather than decorative. Second, the figure is computed from your own usage records — volume multiplied by a named, versioned emission factor — not from a corporate-wide claim somewhere on a website.
Why procurement asks, and why a blended number fails the check
Vendor ESG questions land in two places: the supplier questionnaire attached to an RFP, and the scope-3 category in a customer's own emissions inventory. Either way, a CPaaS provider's part of the question is "what did the communications we bought from you emit?"
A single blended gram-per-message figure answers that badly. It fails three checks a procurement analyst runs:
- Mixed physics. An SMS, a WhatsApp message, an email, and a voice minute do not carry the same per-unit footprint. Multiply one factor across all of them and the error does not average out — it concentrates on whichever channel dominated your volume.
- No reconciliation. If the number cannot be decomposed into channel, volume, and factor, the receiving team cannot tie it to the sending volume they see on the invoice.
- No drift control. Emission factors get revised. A factor that is not named and dated cannot be restated when the underlying factor set is updated.
A per-channel breakdown passes those checks: each line reports the channel, the usage quantity, the factor applied per unit, and the resulting CO2e. That is what Orbit's sustainability surface shows, and the CSV carries the same structure into the questionnaire.
What Orbit ships
The surface lives at Insights → Sustainability, open to owner, admin, developer, and billing roles. It presents:
- Headline totals — estimated CO2e for the selected window in kilograms and grams, plus the factor-set version used to compute them.
- A per-channel breakdown — for each channel, the usage quantity (messages or voice minutes), the factor applied per unit, and the total.
- A date-range picker — preset windows or a custom start/end pair, so you can scope the report to the procurement period being asked about.
- A Download CSV button — an authenticated export of the same report, named for the window it covers.
The CSV is self-describing: it carries the factor-set version and the reporting window alongside the per-channel lines, so the recipient can reconcile the file months later without guessing at its scope.
How the estimate is computed
The arithmetic is deliberately simple, and the CSV exposes it line by line. For message channels, Orbit counts delivered outbound units in the window; for voice, it counts minutes. Each line is:
> channel usage in the window × published emission factor for that channel = estimated CO2e
Two properties make this reproducible and honest rather than a black box:
- The factor set is versioned. Every report states which factor-set version produced the numbers, and the version bumps whenever a factor changes, so a report from one quarter can be reconciled against a report from another.
- The factors are shown, not hidden. The per-unit factor applied to each channel appears in the breakdown table and in the export. A channel not yet in the factor table uses an explicit default estimate, labelled as such.
The figure is an estimate and presents itself as one: published factors applied to your real volumes. It is not audited, it is not a certification, and it does not include anything beyond the outbound communications the platform metered.
Attaching the export to an SRM or procurement packet
The practical path:
- Open Insights → Sustainability and set the window to the period the questionnaire covers (typically a calendar year or quarter, set with the custom range).
- Verify the totals reconcile directionally with the sending volume your billing shows for the same period.
- Download the CSV and attach it to the supplier questionnaire, SRM record, or scope-3 worksheet.
- Cite the factor-set version from the report in the questionnaire's methodology field, so the receiving analyst knows the basis of the estimate.
Because the export is per-channel, keep the line detail in the attachment rather than collapsing it to a single total — the detail is what survives a vendor-review follow-up.
This is tenant-owned usage analytics, not a sustainability page
Plenty of CPaaS providers publish a sustainability page with a company-wide pledge and no tenant-visible number. What Orbit ships is different in kind: the figures come from your workspace's own outbound usage records, computed with a factor set you can read, over a window you choose, and exportable into your own reporting. Nothing is attested, certified, or offset on your behalf — the dashboard hands you the data and the basis behind it, and what you do with it in your own disclosure stays yours. If a questionnaire demands a certified figure, the honest follow-up is to have your estimate audited; the export is built to survive exactly that scrutiny.
Try it
Open Insights → Sustainability in your Devotel Orbit dashboard, pick the window your last RFP asked about, and download the CSV. The report runs on the analytics endpoints behind GET /analytics/carbon and GET /analytics/carbon/export, so the same export is available programmatically if your procurement pipeline wants it on a schedule rather than on a click.