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Headquartered in Malmö, Sweden, Cloudist AB is on a mission to help managed service providers embrace the transformative potential of the cloud. But Robert Brink, the company’s cloud architect, notes there is a caveat.

“We want our customers to be able to provide their clients with high-performance cloud services from the Nordic region’s most secure data centers with one click,” says Brink. “We want them to take advantage of the peace of mind we offer – 100% predictable costs, no vendor lock-in, no commitment periods, and the scalability they need to remain nimble. But first and foremost, we want them to make a choice to create a positive change for the planet.”

This positive change is to address an issue that is more than a business imperative for Cloudist. It’s the very mission of the company: to decrease the carbon emissions generated by cloud services and the operation of the data centers that make them possible.

“Cloud-based digitalization is the future, but today’s cloud services are responsible for nearly 4% of all CO2 emissions,” adds Brink. “When you look at that in context – Climatiq for example estimates that commercial air travel is responsible for 2.4% – the importance of offering cloud services in a way that eliminates carbon emissions is readily apparent. We provide 100% green cloud services because we believe we have to, not just as a company, but collectively as providers of the IT services and solutions enterprises need to work smarter and more sustainably. Our mission is to be a pioneer and a driving force for positive change by offering green cloud solutions.”

All of Cloudist’s services use entirely renewable energy sources throughout the entire delivery chain. This includes facilities operated by Ecodatacenters in Falun and Piteå. Powered by 75% hydropower and 25% wind power, the data center Falun offers unparalleled security and is optimized for high-density applications. The data center in Piteå is powered completely by hydropower and in turn offers ironclad security and high availability.

Notably, Cloudist’s cloud services include Infrastructure-as-a-Service based on VMware Cloud Director and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service based on VMware Cloud Director Availability. Some of the company’s many additional offerings include Storage-as-a-Service for S3 Object Storage and Cloudist’s Microsoft 365 Backup, a secure and complete backup for Microsoft 365 services that lets enterprises quickly get back to business after everything from user errors to ransomware attacks.

“We have a long relationship with VMware and know firsthand that it is trusted and relied on by organizations across industries,” says Brink. “With our motto being ‘Green Clouds Ahead™’ it is only natural and fitting that we would wholeheartedly support and participate in the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative.”

Brink stresses that Cloudist’s services are particularly impactful for small- and medium-sized enterprises that are often using legacy hardware and on-premises systems installed with little or no thought given to sustainability. Needless to say, power savings and the efficient use of heat were not priorities.

“Our customers want to make a difference and adhere to the corporate sustainability policies and goals they put in place,” he says. “We can help almost any organization make a meaningful leap in the right direction given our 100% fossil fuel-free services and carbon positive footprint, but for organizations that are making the shift from legacy, on-premises data centers the sustainability gains are truly dramatic right out of the gate.”

To Brink, these gains are far more than good business. They are personal.

“There are seven natural wonders of the world. Only one of them is in the clouds, the Northern Lights. We are from the North. We live and work in the North, but with the growing levels of cloud cover driven by climate change, we face a very real possibility that the northern lights will be forever hidden from view,” says Brink. “For all of us here at Cloudist, those same lights and their beauty and magic are our inspiration to do everything we can not only to ensure there are ‘Green Clouds Ahead™,’ but also that we collectively make real gains in reducing carbon emissions quickly. We don’t have time to waste in our collective efforts to combat climate change.”

Learn more about Cloudist and its partnership with VMware here.

Cloud Management, Green IT

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If you recycle, you’re living your belief that using and regenerating products or components in environmentally friendly ways is good for our planet and its people. By extension, you’ll likely find value in the circular economy concept. According to the renowned Ellen MacArthur Foundation, “Through design, we can eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature, creating an economy that benefits people, business, and the natural world.”

The question: Are your product teams prepared to implement circular economy practices?

A personal view of a circular economy

As a child, I played nearby while my parents tugged thousands of rusty nails from used lumber salvaged from a weathered gray warehouse 75 miles away. That lumber formed the walls of our first home. We kept our garden busy year-round, rotating crops to replenish the soil. We canned, froze, and dried our produce because the closest grocery store was 25 hard miles and one-fourth of a tank of gas away. From peelings, stalks, and cuttings, we fed our pets. This was our circular economy, where we reused and repurposed everything until we used it up.

The push from the top to deliver against goals

Now, with 94% of organizations integrating environmental, sustainability, and governance goals into their strategy, CIOs, operations teams, and solutions engineers are under mounting pressure to produce results. One way to transform operations and deliverables is to consider circular economy practices when designing offerings. Unfortunately, many in design and development roles lack formal training in these practices and need help integrating them into their offerings while delivering against shrinking deadlines. 

How a rapid learn-and-pivot methodology can help

The good news: An agile, four-phase innovation methodology can jumpstart sustainable development by helping teams ask the right questions at each phase. With the underlying concepts in mind, teams can begin creating more sustainable products. 

To do this, teams must emphasize the “cycle”–starting with a traditional life cycle like the one shown but with sustainability at its core. Every team and team member involved in the product life cycle must consider multiple variables, factoring in the environmental and human impact of the offerings they’re developing and putting into the market.

The Innovation team at Iron Mountain uses a four-phase customer-focused methodology called Compassion-Driven Innovation.

In this paper–How to Accelerate Sustainability  – we’ve augmented that methodology by adding critical sustainability concepts and sharing our approach to integrating sustainability into innovation practices.

We’ve outlined the four phases of innovation—Include, Discover, Enlighten, and Activate—and included foundational information about emissions and circular economy concepts. We’ve also integrated questions about sustainability and related considerations regarding a product’s impact on society.

For example, in the Include phase, teams might ask questions like:

What are the sustainability considerations related to this area?What is the state of the art for circular practices in this area?How can a solution or process related to this area reduce waste, lower energy consumption, or cut emissionsHow might it impact societal considerations? For example, can it improve the user’s life?Might it take away or shift jobs? How can we be sure that it is non-discriminatory?

Using this approach, product design and development teams can have exploratory discussions with internal environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) experts and external customers to better understand a product’s potential impact. With this information, they can design offerings that benefit us all.

Every effort matters

My family had no words for what we did while living in our circular economy. It was simply a way of life passed through generations. We minimized our environmental footprint while reusing and recycling what might have been waste, minimizing pollution, and regenerating the soil. We thrived from it. That house built from those weathered boards still stands more than a half-century later, covered in rosy shingles just as my mom imagined–inviting us to gather and remember the warmth and joy we’ve shared inside. Someone else’s trash became our refuge.

No matter how small or insignificant, everyone’s efforts matter. Anyone who recycles, reuses, and repurposes materials contributes to sustainability and, to varying degrees, the circular economy.

More resources

A wealth of information exists on the circular economy concept, particularly from The Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. For more information about achieving your organization’s sustainability goals, see Rethink Sustainability.

Debra Slapak, Senior Director of Innovation Strategic Initiatives at Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain

Debra Slapak is a co-author of “Compassion-Driven Innovation: 12 Steps for Breakthrough Success”. She is senior director of innovation strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, where she leads the team responsible for the global enterprise innovation thought leadership and research programs. Debra has led marketing programs at Dell and IBM, crafting thought leadership research, education, and outreach in areas such as enterprise edge and 5G, artificial intelligence, data analytics, data management, sustainability, metaverses, and unified asset strategy. Throughout her career, she has engaged with customers, analysts, researchers, subject-matter experts, and strategists to illuminate innovation opportunities springing from emerging technologies. She’s a registered nurse, adventurous chef, therapy pet handler, wife and mother, pet lover, and natural gardener in the fertile wine country of central Texas.

Digital Transformation

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Now, more than ever, global businesses have an opportunity. With people and infrastructure touching every point on the planet — and new technology empowering us to radically change the way we consume resources — we can lead the world toward a better, more sustainable future. 

That optimism stems from three core beliefs: 

We can build our business ecosystems to promote environmental stewardship, achieving ambitious goals like net zero and zero waste. We can foster well-being and growth, as well as diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), for all our people — those who work for us and those who live in the communities we touch. We can grow our businesses through innovation and digitization, establishing long-term prosperity without social or environmental compromise. 

Learn how TCS and Microsoft are powering sustainability through innovation.  

Green IT, Retail Industry

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Now, more than ever, global businesses have an opportunity. With people and infrastructure touching every point on the planet — and new technology empowering us to radically change the way we consume resources — we can lead the world toward a better, more sustainable future. 

That optimism stems from three core beliefs: 

We can build our business ecosystems to promote environmental stewardship, achieving ambitious goals like net zero and zero waste. We can foster well-being and growth, as well as diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), for all our people — those who work for us and those who live in the communities we touch. We can grow our businesses through innovation and digitization, establishing long-term prosperity without social or environmental compromise. 

Learn how TCS and Microsoft are powering sustainability through innovation.  

Financial Services Industry, Green IT

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Data is the powerhouse of digital transformation. That’s no surprise. But did you know that data is also one of the most significant factors in whether a company can achieve its sustainability goals? 

Business leaders are at a crossroads. On one hand, a perilous financial landscape threatens to stall growth, with companies of all sizes retreating to more well-established profit drivers. On the other hand, environmental stewardship has swelled into a legitimate consideration underpinning nearly every business decision, underscored by the severity of recent climate reports and a surge in consumer activism.  

This begs the question – as digital and environmental transition both hit the top of corporate agendas, what are the most important changes needed to achieve this dual transition?  

In this webinar, Microsoft’s Rosie Mastrandrea, TCS’ Jai Mishra, and Equinor’s Vegard Torset explore the crossroads of data and digital transformation — and how the right approach can unlock your sustainability goals. 

Watch the webinar.  

Digital Transformation, Financial Services Industry

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Decarbonising transportation through electrification is critical to helping companies and economies meet net-zero emissions targets. Fortunately, three forces are combining to make this vision for sustainable transportation a reality: connectivity, digitalisation, and cross-sector collaboration.

In a recent “fireside chat” on the topic of sustainable transportation, Erik Ekudden, CTO of Ericsson, and Christian Levin, CEO of Scania, discussed the importance of 5G connectivity and digitalisation in helping companies meet their net-zero goals. This subject is critical to both companies. Ericsson is committed to halving carbon emissions by 2030 while Scania’s electrification commitment stipulates that half its vehicle sales are to be battery-electric vehicles (BEV) by 2030.

During their discussion, Levin identified 5G connectivity from Ericsson as fundamentally important to enabling Scania’s future transportation model. This is because a great deal of information will need to flow during the transition to sustainable transportation – from the digital support of electric vehicles, to providing customers with information on where to charge their vehicles and how to optimise the charging process. The connectivity and access to fast data enabled by Ericsson is already proving invaluable to Scania, underpinning R&D processes that have resulted in its latest fuel-efficient engine platform.

Levin added that his business is finding “more and more” use cases for leveraging data, whether that be improving products, better assisting customers or using geo-location tracking.

5G connectivity also supports the broader role for digitalisation in enabling sustainable transportation. For Ericsson and Scania, digitalisation holds the various components of electrified transportation together. One takeaway from the debate on this topic is that as the world moves to a sustainable transportation ecosystem all players will need to collaborate more closely, including communications technology providers like Ericsson, vehicle manufacturers like Scania, and the energy and grid companies that will provide the power infrastructure.

As Levin explains: “We should see [digitalisation] as a glue that is holding the different systems together…without this glue, we will not be able to do the transition.”

So, how exactly can companies from different industries best support one another? According to Ekudden and Levin, what’s needed is a change in business logic, moving away from supplier-buyer relationships to true partnerships, while standardising on the very latest in connectivity technologies such as 5G. This approach has proven to be a winning strategy in many industries by accelerating technology development and will now prove vital as the world transitions to more sustainable transportation.

Ekudden explains: “It’s super important to be early on the latest technology but also to put new requirements on the next generation of that platform because that guides some of the competitiveness of the offering [being brought] to market.”

As transportation moves to an electrified future, companies like Ericsson and Scania are building new partner ecosystems and leveraging the latest in network connectivity and digitalisation to innovate. Together, Ericsson and Scania are committed to mitigating climate change with new technology and the result will be a transportation system that is exponentially better for our planet.

Click here to watch Ericsson and Scania’s fireside chat in full.

Ericsson and Scania are members of the Exponential Roadmap, a science-based, cross-sector initiative to accelerate exponential climate action and solutions. Learn more here.

5G, Digital Transformation, Transportation and Logistics Industry

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Choice Hotels International’s early and big bet on the cloud has allowed it to glean the many benefits of its digital transformation and devote more energies to a key corporate value — sustainability, its CIO maintains.

That is largely due to the 80-year-old hotel chain’s tight partnership with Amazon Web Services, says Choice CIO Brian Kirkland, who claims his company is enjoying the cost benefits and energy efficiencies of the cloud while exploiting many of 225 related services AWS offers such as analytics and AI to keep advancing on its digital reservations and pricing platform.

Kirkland, a founding member of SustainabilityIT.org, an organization to drive global sustainability through technology leadership, says Choice was the first hospitality company to make a strategic commitment to developing a cloud-native and sustainable platform on AWS.

The cloud platform helped Choice pivot quickly during the pandemic, enabling it to scale on demand as hotel traffic went down. It also helped reduce energy consumption and costs. More importantly, perhaps, pushing all in on the cloud has freed up Choice to be not just a hospitality company and franchisor, but to Kirkland’s considerable pride, a technology company as well, he says.

“I’m not in the business of managing infrastructure,” says Kirkland, whose previous stints at GoDaddy and Intel helped build the technology acumen he parlays in a new type of industry he joined in 2015. “I am in the business of hospitality. Our goal is to deliver business value for our franchisees and our guests by leveraging AWS.” 

With Amazon taking care of infrastructure, patching, and security, Choice’s 650-member Scottsdale, Ariz.-based IT team can focus on building business value using a plethora of AWS services, including Amazon Aurora, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes, as well as other SaaS tools such as Automation Anywhere and IDeaS for the cloud-based revenue management system Choice built called Choice Max, also on AWS.

This cloud-native strategy is essential to building unique value Choice’s core customers, owners of franchises ranging from Comfort Inn to EconoLodge, Quality Inn, and upper scale Cambria Inn. With its recent acquisition of the Radisson chain, Choice now operates 22 brands and more than 650,000 hotel rooms in 46 nations, including 1 in every 10 hotel rooms in the US.

And his team can do this more sustainably, another “benefit that’s important to us,” Kirkland says. “If you look at Amazon’s journey, and the way they run their data centers, they claim to be five times more energy efficient than an average data center.” 

Choice’s all-in cloud journey

Choice got its digital start building an iOS-based iPhone app for its franchise customers about a decade ago. By 2015, it was redesigning its property management system on the cloud, called Choice Advantage, which is licensed to third-party companies, including rivals.

In 2017, Choice, one of the largest franchisors globally, representing 7,500 franchisees that collectively generate roughly $10 billion in annual revenues, debuted the crown jewel of its digital transformation: a cloud-native central reservation system called ChoiceEdge. The system was built from the ground up using a variety of microservices on AWS to ensure hotel rooms booked by travel agents, SaaS partners such as Travelocity, and wholesalers are queued and synchronized properly — no easy task given that, because of the finite number of hotel rooms available, reservations have to be handled perfectly, Kirkland says.

“It is the brains of everything — our core system. It is a very complex system, and we were the first company to completely rewrite our reservation system for the cloud from scratch,” Kirkland says. “We are using Java applications to build our logic but also AWS middleware technology in many, many ways across our ecosystem to build Choice Edge. All the logic is still in Java hosted on Amazon’s infrastructure.”

Aside from the core cloud services, Choice also uses Amazon RedShift as a front end to its cloud data warehouse, Amazon SageMaker to build machine leaning models, and Amazon Kinesis to collect, process, and analyze real-time data.

To ensure more sustainable operations, the company’s tech staff also relies on Amazon Lambda’s serverless, event-driven compute services to run code without provisioning servers. It is a significant energy saver that enables Choice to pay for only what it uses.

Choice Edge has been operational for more than five years and the technology team is able to make changes and slipstream in new AWS services with no interruption, a requirement for an always-on reservation system, Kirkland says. 

“It’s been out there for a long time on the cloud and a big part of our migration journey to get everything out of the data center and into the cloud,” he says, adding that he plans to migrate the Radisson system to Edge this year as well.

Choice closed one data center last year and plans to close its second data center in 2023. The company is on schedule to be 100% in the cloud by year’s end, the CIO says.

Making sustainability a key priority

At Amazon’s recent re:Invent conference,  Steven M. Elinson, managing director of travel and hospitality at AWS, highlighted not only Choice’s ability to deliver to its franchisees the cost and scalability benefits of the cloud but also the company’s leadership in making sustainability a unique value for the hotel chain, applauding Kirkland and Choice Distinguished Cloud Platform Architect Shawn Seaton for “working to build a more sustainable future for generations that are yet to come.”

Kirkland, whose work with SustainabilityIT.org underscores his passion about driving more sustainable IT operations across the industry, believes IT is entering a critical moment in time when advances in the cloud and services such as Lambda can help make a difference. But he still knows his core job as an IT leader is delivering business value and insists that CIOs and technologists must try to make use of these services — if not for the environment’s survival, then for their own company’s survival.

“The world has never experienced as much data that is available and readily accessible as it is right now with the cloud and with the technology that exists in today’s world. If you are sitting there doing nothing with it, you’re leaving an untapped opportunity on the table,” Kirkland says.

“I don’t have hundreds or thousands of employees out there building the technology. Amazon does,” he says. “I can use all that data and the cloud technology from Amazon and to do something that drives business value where in the past you couldn’t. To me, that’s the untapped opportunity for every business and every company in the world. That really is going to be a differentiator for the ones that do it well versus the ones that don’t.”

Cloud Computing, Green IT, Travel and Hospitality Industry

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PET is a major industrial polymer used to manufacture the polyester fibers used in clothing, plastic bottles, and much more. As such, it is the most widely recycled plastic in the world. As a global chemical company and producer of PET, Indorama Ventures Limited (IVL) has made sustainability a priority for over a decade, from energy and greenhouse gas reductions to increased renewable energy and recycling.

To illustrate, from 2011 to 2021, IVL collected over 72 billion post-consumer PET bottles for recycling, which prevented 1.6 million tons of plastic waste from going to landfill and reduced 2.4 million tons of carbon footprint in the product life cycle. And IVL is experimenting with recyclable plastics as part of a circular economy model. 

The company received the Asia Responsible Enterprise Awards 2022 for circular economy leadership, which recognized IVL’s successful PET Bottles Recycling to Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) Distribution project. Their medical-grade PPE suits — reusable and washable up to 20 times — are certified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

To bring sustainability home, IVL sought to maximize the efficiency of its plants through digital transformation by replacing data silos with a single data source that would revolutionize enterprise asset management (EAM). Taking digital transformation to the next level, IVL’s Oxides and Derivatives Division applied the concept to their risk-based inspection program at the Port Neches Operations (PNO) Facility.  

“Based on our rapid growth trajectory, we were looking for a solution that could scale and assist us in realizing maximum efficiencies in various business processes,” explains Joel Presley, PNO, inspection team leader. “Additionally, striving for continuous improvement, we were looking for a solution to take our existing mechanical integrity program and strategies and integrate them with our maintenance and business processes.”

Indorama Ventures Limited

Making the expansion of risk-based philosophy a reality

“A critical work process for mechanical integrity is risk-based inspection, which allows us to prioritize asset inspection planning based on the consequence and likelihood of failure versus traditional time-based interval planning,” explains Adam Wallace, PNO RBI coordinator. 

Core challenges included complex and siloed business processes with a lot of customizations, out-of-sync data and processes, disparate and niche applications with inconsistent data and assets, and expensive and unsustainable data and risk management that lacked innovation and adaptability.

About four years ago, IVL expanded the use of risk acceptance at its PNO facility in Texas to establish next-inspection plans. By doing this, they could move away from the arbitrary inspection intervals prescribed by their previous software and use the efficiencies of the relative risk ranking process defined in American Petroleum Institute (API) 580.

“While this new practice helped us realize significant improvements in the inspection program, the software was incapable of automating the process, which meant that significant manual effort was required to run multiple what-if analyses to reach the conclusions needed,” adds Presley.

Instead of a holistic view, plant operators had to access data silos — outside of the EAM system — from disparate software solutions developed to manage inspection, maintenance, risk, pressure relief, safety instrumented systems, and other critical functions, like hazard and operability (HAZOP). This disparity could lead to minor or even catastrophic chemical releases.

“In 2020, our facility decided that we would be moving away from the previous software to the SAP Intelligent Asset Management with AsInt’s native SAP Risk Based Inspection and Inspection Database Management software solution,” says Joel Presley, IVL PNO.

During the implementation, it was clear the flexibility of the software made it possible to fully utilize the concepts of API-580 by automating IVL’s new, risk-based inspection strategies. Adam Wallace (IVL PNO) adds, “With AsInt/SAP, we can take it to the next step by integrating transitional risk evaluation to maximize the efficiency of the inspection program.”

Managing asset integrity on a scalable, sustainable platform

With the new platform linking inspection mitigation plans and maintenance workflows, IVL has reduced the IT cost of ownership by 30%. Plant operators have a holistic view of both the physical and virtual assets needed to address high-risk equipment in order to prevent, for example, a loss of containment. Productivity has quadrupled while maintaining the overall risk of the facility to approved levels, and both scalability and sustainability have been served. IVL expects ROI at the PNO facility to total 5 to 20 times the cost of implementation over the next five years.

Indorama Ventures was a finalist in the 2022 SAP Innovation Awards Program. Learn how they built the new integrated platform in their pitch deck.

Data Management

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As the world works to reverse climate change through decarbonization and reduced reliance on fossil fuels, the oil and gas industry finds itself at the epicenter of this challenge. Governments, institutional investors, consumers, and employees continue to exert growing pressure on oil and gas providers to decarbonize and adopt renewable solutions. In response, oil and gas majors are making headway in terms of carbon reporting, net-zero targets, and accountability. Many have even spun up renewable energy arms.

Innovation underpins corporate sustainability efforts. From an investment standpoint, sustainable solutions can also perform double duty, often yielding significant added value such as productivity and efficiency gains and new revenue streams. Increasingly, oil and gas companies are making strategic technology investments to accelerate sustainable digital transformation and deliver a competitive advantage. In this article, we’ll share opportunities for oil and gas companies to increase sustainability while achieving other business benefits.

Understand and reduce the environmental impact of services and workloads

Ironically, while technology holds the key to sustainability, it has also contributed to the problem. Recent studies indicate that data centers consume one percent of the world’s electricity, and The Royal Society estimates that digital technology contributes up to 5.9% of global emissions.

While inefficient equipment, buildings, and HVAC systems contribute to the problem, one of the most significant factors is the underutilization of data center equipment. Up to 25% of data center power is consumed by equipment that no longer performs useful work,[i] and only 10-30% of server capacity is used.[ii] Furthermore, according to HPE internal data, average storage utilization hovers around 40%.[iii] While organizations must plan for usage spikes and failovers, they also have opportunities to clean up workloads, retire unused equipment, and leverage newer, more efficient hardware and solutions.

Power savings represents just part of the equation. If an enterprise can do more work with less hardware, using fewer servers, licenses, and people, they save money while lowering carbon emissions.

Apply technology to improve efficiency, productivity, and sustainability

Clear visibility across infrastructure enables organizations to identify opportunities to expand operational efficiency, meet sustainability goals, and improve productivity. Using intelligent automation, oil and gas companies can monitor workloads and boost server utilization to optimize their investments while reducing their environmental footprint.

Infrastructure management solutions enable organizations to simplify lifecycle management through automation and surface new ways to operate more sustainably and efficiently. Oil and gas companies are also deploying self-healing solutions that predict, detect, and correct issues across the infrastructure using artificial intelligence and machine learning, often before the operator is aware of an issue. 

Furthermore, monitoring solutions allow companies to track real-time energy consumption, enabling them to reposition energy-heavy workloads to locations with lower energy costs or optimize usage for carbon emissions.

Make asset management more sustainable

Oil and gas customers rely on the latest technologies to give them a competitive edge. This often means replacing assets with several years of useful life remaining.

Upcycling programs can help enterprise businesses manage the financial and sustainability impacts of surplus equipment. Many companies have budget or purchasing policy constraints or do not need the latest top-performing equipment. By securing reasonable compensation for used equipment from such companies, oil and gas companies can extend the useful life of their assets and further reduce waste.

Drive sustainable digital transformation with HPE GreenLake

Through strategic investments, oil and gas companies not only increase their sustainability but can also reap additional rewards, such as increased efficiency and productivity, while maintaining a competitive edge.

HPE has a unique vantage point rooted in its own sustainability journey. HPE is committed to becoming a net-zero enterprise by 2040 and offers a portfolio of sustainable innovation, technologies, solutions, and cloud services. The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform can reduce the environmental impact of IT by enabling customers to flexibly scale IT to meet their needs, thereby improving utilization levels and avoiding the waste of overprovisioning.

GDT can help your organization make the most of HPE solutions to fast-forward sustainability, grow stronger, and become more resilient. Contact the experts at GDT to learn more about how we can help you accelerate sustainable digital transformation.

[i] Jon Taylor and Jonathan Koomey (2017) “Zombie/Comatose Servers Redux,” available at: https://www.anthesisgroup.com/report-zombie-and-comatose-servers-redux-jon-taylor-and-jonathan-koomey/  (accessed October 18, 2022)

[ii] Uptime Institute (2020) “Beyond PUE: Tackling IT’s wasted terawatts,” available at: https://uptimeinstitute.com/beyond-pue-tackling-it%E2%80%99s-wasted-terawatts (accessed October 18, 2022)

[iii] Storage Utilization: HPE customer experience

Innovation

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In a world where sustainability has become the new norm, technology is a key driving force for innovative businesses. Today, companies are looking for sustainable ways to reinvent the entire ecosystem of customers, suppliers, contract manufacturers, logistics service providers, and partners to support their supply chains from product design to operation.

Let’s look at last year’s SAP Innovation Awards (SIA2022) winner cases to see how future-minded companies are harnessing cloud technologies to create economic, social, and environmental impacts to improve people’s lives.

Improve decision-making with real-time planning

The 50th Anniversary Legend of the SIA2022 program, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH (FHCS), used different planning approaches and sources, which made it difficult to get a consolidated enterprise-wide view.

FHCS integrated its landscape built on SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse with specialized forecasting in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Having a single, centralized source of data enabled the company to generate simulations, planning, and reporting solutions based on SAP Analytics Cloud. It now takes FHCS only two days to create an initial top-down production plan. By standardizing forecasting processes across its consumer products division, Freudenberg achieved 10x faster planning despite larger data volumes and greater granularity.

Agile decision-making is key in volatile business environments. The process involves several factors that create complications. That’s why having a closed-loop planning process based on a single source is essential for companies to plan not only values but also volumes at any level of detail, which helps them avoid discrepancies between financial and operational plans.

Utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence for sustainable logistics

As more and more companies step into the sustainability game, ensuring sustainable logistics processes is now less of a trend and more of a necessity. Companies that realized the importance of moving beyond financial measures have been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for having full visibility into the supply chain operations.

Arpa Industriale, the SIA2022 building products industry social catalyst award winner, needed to respond to explosive growth in demand. The company was looking for a way to optimize and stabilize that production process while meeting ambitious targets for renewable energy use and reduction of waste and resource consumption.

The Italian manufacturer connected all vehicles in the factory warehouse in real time to work autonomously 24/7 with the goal of loading and reloading bar-coded rolls of raw materials. The sales orders in the system automatically update SAP Extended Warehouse Management, SAP Manufacturing Execution, and SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence for raw material provisioning and production-line scheduling.

With real-time data and machine-learning algorithms analyzing every millisecond of their daily operations, the company reduced energy and water consumption by 80%. By using scrap monitoring dashboards in manufacturing operations, Arpa reduced scrap waste by 96% and saved €750,000 in the first year.

Synchronize physical and digital worlds in Metaverse

Imagine a digital world independent of physical conditions in which you can provide real-time information and a collaborative working environment for employees, business partners, and customers all around the world regardless of distance and physical barriers.

Automotive industry leader award owner Martur Fompak created a metaverse that synchronizes a convergence of the physical and digital worlds. The Turkish car manufacturer created digital twins of 45 robotic welding cells and integrated them into the virtual environment to monitor product and process parameters and calculate real-time carbon emission and energy consumption. The digital twins are implemented using two-way IoT connections with the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence and SAP Manufacturing Execution platform and synchronized with the physical world.

By running real-time analytics, Martur Fompak reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 12%.

Generate renewable energy with predictive maintenance

As one of the most eco-friendly energy sources, solar panels are the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy source that helps companies save time and cost to reach net-zero emission goals.

ENGIE, the utility industry leader and winner of SIA2022, has moved to renewable energy with predictive maintenance in solar farms. The French energy giant utilized 7,600 solar panels in the scope of the digital twin project for maintenance management. This allowed the ENGIE subsidiary in Chile to get an insightful combination of data for optimizing maintenance activities under a cost-benefit evaluation. Generated alerts were 100% reliable, which helped ENGIE reduce the overall cost by 45% for the maintenance of solar panels and inverters.

Focus on end-to-end digitization, not on the problem

Even though companies started their digitization journey a long time ago they can end up with fragmented systems that hinder them to extract meaningful data. Focusing only on the problem area or one aspect may not be the most substantial solution when it comes to digitization.

SIA2022 transformation champion category winner, Fulton County Schools (FCS), is the fourth largest school system in Georgia, with more than 17,600 employees. The school’s existing ERP was more than 12 years old. In addition, the asset management was handled via a third-party solution and not integrated with SAP. Moreover, the system required business users to perform complex manual tasks in multiple disparate systems which increased the risk of human error.

With SAP S/4HANA, FCS created the foundation for a centralized asset data repository, work order management, and equipment tracking to increase overall equipment effectiveness, reliability, and audibility. And with SAP Intelligent Asset Management, the school could identify items that it needed to order and capture while having insights into on-hand assets.

By focusing on transforming the entire organization, FCS is now able to proactively make decisions based on real-time actionable data. This enabled FCS to achieve 52% more accuracy and insights into invoices related to vendors and suppliers while increasing real-time reporting and analytics by 23%.

Discover how future-oriented business leaders embed sustainability within operations to accelerate advancements in both sustainability and operational outcomes: IDC Spotlight: Integrated Supply Chain Planning.

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