The CSH, as it’s known, is something of a cross between a dorm, a computer science lab, and an inventor’s garage located on the third floor of the Nathaniel Rochester Hall. A 2005 graduate of The Rochester Institute of Technology in northern New York state, Oettinger had been a member of the Computer Science House while at school. Giving back to the alma materįred Oettinger, a staff engineer who leads a small group on the Messaging Team at Wayfair, was one of the first to reach out about a possible donation. “It was in this process of finding an ethical way to dispose of the servers,” More continued, “that some people within Wayfair reached out and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing with this stuff? Because we have affiliations with these schools and these other programs that could really use the hardware if Wayfair doesn't have a plan for it.’” “As we were disposing of the hardware, we wanted it to be done in an ethical way,” Jen More, a senior engineering manager at Wayfair who helped lead the decommissioning project, said during a recent tour of the data center, standing amongst the no-longer-glowing racks. It's an act of sustainability as much as charity, keeping valuable technology going, rather than going to the scrap heap. On rare occasions, they are donated to an institution or nonprofit, where the servers can take on a new life improving the lives of others. Less often, they are sold to another organization, restarting the cycle of capital expenditure and cost amortization for someone else. Or they can be sent to a recycling center and shredded for parts and materials. Sometimes - after they’re wiped and secured - the servers are sold back to the data center operator to wait for a new client. Until they were gone, off to fill new potential and purpose. Wayfair's servers, housed in a data center outside Boston, were a nest of electronic activity and wires. So, what happens to those machines once they’ve served their purpose? Now, with many organizations moving much or all of their digital work to the cloud, it’s leading to the wholesale decommissioning of their server fleets, and the sensitive work that comes with that. Traditionally, a company would update and replace its servers over time, as its computing needs evolved and shifted. While we often ponder the future of infrastructure, it’s less common to consider its afterlife. That’s when Wayfair completed a two-year migration to Google Cloud. A short drive from Wayfair’s downtown Boston headquarters, the facility has played host to the company’s digital operations since 2016, up until last year. In fact, this lonely stretch has been the address of one of the world’s largest home furnishing businesses, or at least its roughly 2,000 servers. In a gesture of sustainability and generosity, Wayfair donated more than 2,000 of its servers to a pair of important educational institutions, where they will keep driving future innovation and entrepreneurship.But that still left one hard question: What to do with all its old hardware? Wayfair did, for the numerous benefits it offered its globally scaled business.Is your organization prepared to go all-in on the public cloud?.Wayfair stock was up 4.5% in Thursday premarket trading, and has gained 20% for the year to date. And repeat customers placed 74.5% of total orders in the first quarter, compared with 69.8% last year. Average order value was $237, up from $235 last year. Active customers reached 33.2 million as of March 31, up 57.3% year-over-year. Revenue was up 49% year-over-year compared with 45% in the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter, Wayfair reported revenue of $3.67 billion. Revenue of $3.478 billion was up from $2.330 billion last year and ahead of the FactSet consensus for $3.394 billion. Adjusted EPS was $1.00, ahead of the FactSet consensus for 26 cents. Under the old system, the company says it would have reported a loss of 31 cents per share. Wayfair has adopted a new accounting standard, effective Jan. Reported first-quarter net income totaling $18.2 million, or 16 cents per share, after a loss of $285.9 million, or $3.04 per share, last year.
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