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SAP’s 2011 Sustainability Report

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SAP 2011 Sustainability Report

SAP launched its 2011 Sustainability Report this week and in terms of aesthetics and social sharing, this is one of the best Sustainability Reports I have seen to-date.

The site contains many videos with SAP staff – including one from co-CEO’s Jim Hagemann Snabe & Bill McDermott which is featured prominently on the home page. Interestingly there are also several customer reference videos as well with the customers vouching for how SAP have helped them become more sustainable.

There are also many blog posts and interesting stories from SAP employees talking about everything from Materiality, through to Electric Vehicles.

There is a whole section in the report dedicated to how SAP Empowers its customers. It includes customer video testimonials, white papers and some very impressive top line figures for savings (“5.7 million tons of estimated carbon reductions, saving $550 million in energy costs”). However the methodology for producing these data is not gone into in any detail in this section. I contacted SAP to voice my concerns about this and they assured me that in the next couple of weeks the report will be updated to include the methodologies, and the story around producing this innovative section of the report.

SAP's progress on sustainability

As you’d expect from SAP, there’s also a lot of data in the report on how they are doing on their journey to sustainability and it’s mostly positive results. Almost all of their numbers are headed in the right direction. Unfortunately the exceptions to this are in the environmental area with increases in Data Centre Energy, Total Energy consumed and SAP’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint.

On the data centre energy front, the energy increase is both in real terms, and in kWh per employee. This is likely due to SAP increasingly hosting customers data and applications through their cloud offerings. What might be interesting here would be to see a kWh per cloud customer metric, or similar. Also, one would suspect that there should be a net reduction in energy consumption for that application, if it is replacing a customer’s pre-existing on-premises application. There could be some interesting data to mine there around energy wins.

On the Total Energy Consumed page you see that energy consumption has increased from 843GWh in 2010 to 860GWh in 2011. In the report it attributes this to growth in the business (SAP bought SucessFactors during this period) but the lack of a kWh per Employee metric on this page makes this hard to verify.

On the Greenhouse Gas page, we again see an increase in emissions from the 453kTons 2010 figure to 490kTons in 2011. On this page, it is possible to see a By Employee figure and here too we see an increase in emissions from 8.7 tons per employee in 2010 to 9.0 tons in 2011. However, when we look at the emissions by ? revenue, we see a fall, from 36.3g/? in 2010 to 34.4g/? in 2011. 2011 was a good year for SAP, from a revenue perspective, it would appear.

On the upside, SAP has increased its use of renewable energy from 45% to 47%. Not a huge increase, to be sure, but at least this environmental metric is going in the right direction.

I mentioned that the site has a lot of social sharing built into it – there’s a “Share this page” on every page which allows you to share that page on your social network of choice (or print, or email!). However, in terms of interactivity, the report seems to have regressed. In the 2010 report, there was the ability to comment directly on any page, to rate comments, and see conversations taking place about the page, directly on the page. This functionality has been removed completely from the 2011 report, and to be honest, the report is the poorer for its removal. Browsing other readers comments on pages is always a superb way to gain others insights into the page content – both for consumers of the report, as well as for SAP.

From a UI perspective there are several glitches on the site (some rollovers not working; external links and links to PDF’s not made obvious; and inconsistent use of pretty permalinks etc.) but these are minor quibbles and easily fixed.

The 2010 report doubled individual visitors over the 2009 report, with the 2010 report receiving over 60,000 readers. SAP tell me they are aiming to maintain that progress and have over 120,000 visitors to this, the 2011 report. One huge advantage of having the report in the form of a website, is of course the invaluable data stream you receive from the visitor analytics to the report. Something which is impossible to achieve with a PDF.

On the whole, SAP’s 2011 report, with the removal of the interactivity and the increased energy and emissions, seems to have faltered slightly in terms of the tremendous progress it had been making to-date. To put that in perspective, SAP’s 2011 report is still one of the better produced sustainability reports.

For the 2011 report I’ll have to grade it as “very good, but could do better”.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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IBM based mobile, crowdsourced-reporting application helps schools speed up repairs

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Leaking tap

Attending IBM’s Pulse 2012 event this year I was again struck by how much IBM’s Maximo is used in maintenance management applications.

And why do we care about that you ask?

Well, keeping machinery properly maintained, and alerting if machines go out of tolerance for certain parameters (energy consumption spikes in refrigeration plant, fuel or oil consumption in engines, even the presence (or absence) or certain chemicals, etc.) is often an early sign that that machine/system is faulty. Sometimes this fault can result in extra consumption of a resource, other times it can be a safety issue. In any case the measurement and alerting can kick off a pro-active maintenance ticket which may otherwise have been missed.

Correct scheduling of servicing for a lot of machinery is a sustainability win too. If machines are not serviced according to the manufacturers schedule, consumption tends to increase, but properly maintained they are safer, and typically consume less.

I came across an interesting example of this recently with IBM’s announcement of a project to make the US’s 2nd largest school district one of its greenest and most sustainable.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has 700,000 students, 14,000 buildings spread over 710 square miles in California. It receives more than 300,000 maintenance service requests per year.

How are IBM going to improve it?

They are making it more efficient by allowing students, teachers and staff to report issues like water leaks, broken aircon/heating, exposed cables and so on, by sending text messages and photos through their mobile phones. One receipt of the text, GIS is used to locate the problem which is then submitted directly to the Maintenance & Operations Service Call Desk (which runs on IBM’s Maximo Asset Management software).

?Each year we found we were spending too much time, money, and energy locating, and reporting a problem before we even had the chance to fix it,? says Danny Lu, business analyst, Los Angeles Unified School District. ?By finding a more efficient way to report and locate needed repairs, we are able to respond faster to serve our campuses. The best part is that the solution is at the fingertips of most everyone on campus.?

Text messages are great, but obviously this needs to be expanded way beyond just sms (use of which is declining globally). This kind of project needs to have an app for each of the major phone/tablet OS’s, it needs to be able to listen in on social media channels, as well as being able to receive texts. Only when all communication sources are catered for, will an initiative like this have a chance to make this school district the US’s greenest and most sustainable.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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CarbonSystems EPS chosen by Microsoft for its global environmental reporting

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Microsoft

In my reviews of tech companies sustainability reporting, one very obvious laggard has always been Microsoft. Hopefully that’s all about to change.

Why? Microsoft has just signed up with CarbonSystems to use CarbonSystems cloud-delivered Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP) to manage its energy efficiency initiatives and for reporting its environmental performance globally.

This is big news. Microsoft has 600 facilities across 110 countries worldwide. For the first time, the full energy and environmental footprints of all these sites will now be managed from within a single cloud-delivered resource, the CarbonSystems ESP system. The levels of transparency this will give Microsoft will be immense. Perhaps now, unlike many of its competitors, Microsoft will be able to join the EU’s ICT Footprint initiative.

This move should also enable Microsoft to report on the energy and emissions associated with its own cloud infrastructure – something, like all other cloud providers, Microsoft has failed to do to-date.

This move is a big deal for CarbonSystems too. CarbonSystems are an Australian company and have done quite well there but have more recently been eying the EU and US markets. Being selected by Microsoft for a global rollout has suddenly catapulted them up the credibility charts. Had you asked me previously which 3rd party platform Microsoft might have chosen I’d probably have mentioned SAP, Hara, CA, or Enablon.

Now with this win, CarbonSystems too has a seat at the big boys’ table.

Photo Credit ToddABishop

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The whole interest in sustainability is wearing off isn’t it? SAP’s Scott Bolick answers

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At the SAP TechEd event in Madrid recently, JD-OD.com had an interview scheduled with SAP’s Scott Bolick. Scott is responsible for SAP’s Sustainability Solutions. Dennis Howlett, of JD-OD, knowing my interest in sustainability, asked if I’d like to conduct the conversation with Scott.

I was happy to oblige and so here’s a transcript of our chat:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone. This is Tom Raftery of GreenMonk TV, doing interview for JD-OD. And with me I have Scott Bolick from SAP. Scott, would you like to introduce yourself?

Scott Bolick: Thanks Tom. My name is Scott Bolick as you said, and I’m responsible for SAP Sustainability Solutions and those solutions are across at four different areas and hopefully we can chat a little bit about those now.

Tom Raftery: Sure. So Scott, sustainability it’s a – the whole interest in sustainability is wearing off isn’t it, nobody is really into sustainability these days. Am I right?

Scott Bolick: Well I think you are wrong, I think there is a caveat. I think one of the things that we’ve seen in the market which I think is actually a good sign is that sustainability was a topic de joure in 2008, 2009. It’s still there, you still see more and more CSOs coming online but what you are seeing is instead of a centralization of power within those chief sustainability officers, what you are actually seeing is the sustainability officers setting the strategy for the company.

And then whenever you look at the actual execution, when we look at where people are actually purchasing IT that really is coming down into the LOB, so it’s R&D for sustainable products. It is the supply chain when you look at sustainable supply chain. It’s manufacturing whenever you look at sustainable operations. So I think to say that it’s not there, it is wrong, I think it’s there, it’s stronger than ever. I think what people are discovering is it’s sedimenting back into the underlying businesses and that’s where it should be fundamentally.

Tom Raftery: Okay, but I mean with the current state of the economy, are people really willing to get their –stick their hand in their pocket and spend money on sustainability solutions?

Scott Bolick: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you take a look at why people buy for sustainability, I think there is three reasons people buy. First and foremost is compliance, and there are increasing regulations around the globe whether it be for product or whether it be not just for — whether it be safety and showing that you are increasing the safety within your operations. And so one of course whenever you take a look at that and you look at the complexity of business, it’s spread out on global operations, they need solutions that are IT solutions to be able to adhere to those regulations in a timely and in a low cost manner.

Second you continue to see people interested in those solutions that help them save money, energy management obviously being top of mind.

And third, there are those companies that are spending on aspirational, really trying to understand what is the product footprint of the products that they sell into the market and how they can lower that footprint whether it’d be carbon or whether it’d be other substances.

Tom Raftery: And where are you seeing most of the traction these days? What is the most – what is the area of the largest – well either spend or interest for SAP at the moment?

Scott Bolick: I think if you take a look at some areas that are really hitting for SAP, one of the areas is operational risk management. And if you would go back and you just look at the last couple of years, what you see are these big events that these events happen and then there is a tremendous impact on the brand reputation, there is a tremendous impact on the financial valuation of those companies. And so what you are seeing is companies on a trend, the first trend on operational risk was really about compliance, am I compliant to regulations, now you are seeing people increasingly looking at proactive prevention, how do I actually go out and report incidents before they happen, how do they then analyze those incidents, put them in a risk framework and then how do I actually execute management of change. So we are definitely seeing a tremendous amount of interest from across multiple industries.

And finally what we are beginning to see is some really interesting stuff where people are looking at the tremendous amount of data they have and trying to figure out how they can correlate that data and actually get into predictive analytics around risk. So that’s one of the areas we’re definitely seeing.

Tom Raftery: Okay and when you talk about data I mean a lot of – the various solutions have massive amounts of data associated with them, how is SAP going to handle that, the big data issue?

Scott Bolick: I think one of the things that we are fortunate is that unlike some players in the market, we within SAP have strong technology both for analytics and then when you look at big data obviously we have HANA. So some of the things that we are doing is working with customers and determining how we can leverage HANA to push them over limits that they might otherwise have. Limits in terms of their own operations and limits in terms of processes.

One of the ones I love is we have an embedded product compliance customer who is now looking at putting embedded product compliance on top of HANA. So this company has 100,000 different recipes, they produce 3000 to 4000 documents a day and obviously that’s on the backend, but on the front end they have got to really make sure during the design process that they understand whether or not the substances, whether or not the ingredients are going to be compliant to regulations. One of the things they are doing is by putting it on HANA is they can get the check back in a second rather than getting a check back in terms of minutes or hours. And obviously if you are in R&D, the last thing you want to do is your designing — is to sit in front of the computer and wait to determine whether or not it’s compliant with regulations and obviously those regulations are regulations that are country specific.

Tom Raftery: Sure. So sustainability is here to stay.

Scott Bolick: Absolutely.

Tom Raftery: Great. Scott, thanks a million.

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Sustainability software update from SAP’s Jeremiah Stone

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SAP invited me to attend their combined Sapphire/TechEd event in Madrid last week. While there I took the opportunity to have a chat with Jeremiah Stone to get an update on the state of play in sustainability solutions.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are in Madrid for SAP?s SAPPHIRE event and with me I have Jeremiah Stone. Jeremiah, you are on the SAP sustainability team. What is your role there?

Jeremiah Stone: So, I?m a senior director for solutions management and what that means in SAP is that I?m responsible for the business cases for producing our products, so developing new products. And then I work with our key customers as well in making sure that our products continue to meet their needs and that we do quite a bit co-innovation with customers and that?s my team that tends to drive that as well with our strategic customers and so really managing the business case and then we build and execution, and rollout of products.

Tom Raftery: So there is a business case for sustainability?

Jeremiah Stone: Well, at SAP there sure is. It?s a interesting aspect I think of our sustainability case that people typically are surprised by is that every single one of our investments is actually a bottom up business case just like any other piece of software at SAP where you have to build the customer business case first. So really what is the customers tangible pain, how much are they spending to deal with that pain today, what are their alternatives, how much can we generate in terms of value for the customer with some development, and then is there a reasonable value capture for us, in other words can we charge the customer a reasonable amount of money to justify us investing in the software. And so we do that for every investment that we make and so that also helps the conversation of course from a business point of view because then we?ve done all that work upfront, we can go to the customer, we can explain the customer business case that we?ve developed and we can validate that and from them to make sure that there is a return on that investment and then they can treat it like any other IT investment. And the other thing, you know with sustainability at SAP is its embedded into our business and so when I?m competing for development resources I?m competing right next to the guys who are developing for HANA, the people that are developing for HR, people for financials, CRM et cetera. So we would, be really treated just as any line of business at SAP, we don?t get preferential treatment et cetera and then really is based upon business case for each investment that we make.

Tom Raftery: Cool. And what is the hot button topic for people right now in sustainability?

Jeremiah Stone: It?s a good question, I think right now we see you know phasing of a development of the market, it continues to be really around management of risk and compliance primarily in the safety of operations. So and that goes really there’s asset intensive and asset non-intensive industries, so I?ve customers in transportations and logistics, major airlines, looking at how they can be safe and that is a bottom line number for them. Obviously if they are damaging aircraft or whatever they are not going to be performing well and so that there is really a safety org from a compliance point of view, that is access to markets. So as public and governmental toleration of eco-toxicity of hazardous materials et cetera is declining, there is this more and more transparency around products and their constituent chemicals et cetera and substances.

The regulatory bounds and burden is going up and on companies to declare the substances in their products so that they can sell them in those markets. That?s primary driver skill, we definitely see energy management is the fastest growing area and that?s really energy and environmental resource management, so not just energy but you can think really sort of all of the inputs into the business whether that?s energy for other resources in other words very much you could think of it as a traditional SAP strength, you think around energy. Although, it is a different challenge as you know because there is the utility as well, involved in that and that?s somewhat complex, there is definitely demand for that, is one of the fastest grown, it?s not biggest business yet, but it is the fastest growing. And then we continue to see a smaller market, but still increasing around analytics, reporting strategy management, setting targets, managing to those and then reporting out to I don?t know the global reporting initiative et cetera on sustainability performance, but for the majority where we are making our money today with our product lines is really around that risk management and compliance activities.

Tom Raftery: Okay and the whole sustainability area is a relatively new business area, is it one that you see is going to be going big time, is it, I mean we?ve seen a jump in last couple of years just because companies started getting into it, but you know is it on a hockey stick or is it kind of plateaued or where about is it?

Jeremiah Stone: Well yeah, I mean it?s very rapidly growing market. We see the overall market size growing compound annual growth rate of around 18% to 20%, so it?s a pretty significant growth in the current spending environment. Lot of that?s because of loss control. So if you think of the current global environment, access to credit isn?t available, stability of financial market we?ve learned, interested in making capital investments if they can?t ensure that that capital investment will be safe.

Tom Raftery: Yeah.

Jeremiah Stone: So in ironic way you know really is that sort of resource constraint or fear of loss that?s driving sustainability as well from any investment. So it isn?t necessarily a, you know there is a joke even people when they spend money on software for you know greed, fear or aspiration, most people assume it?s aspirational in nature when people make sustainability investments, because you want a halo or improve your brand image which — there is some of that, but most of our customers it?s really around the loss management. And to a certain extent the — you know the ambition to grow your brand, grow your business. We do have customers like Solvay for example, I think you may have gotten to talk to them over here.

Tom Raftery: I?m going to see them this afternoon, yeah

Jeremiah Stone: Okay, so I mean they — you know, really say that they are more competitive as a result of the investments that they make in sustainability. So it is a growing, it is an evolution of some older lines of business in this case environment health and safety management that has been there for a very long time. And you know we invested and purchased data that?s strategic to us a couple of years ago but we are on a pretty furious trip to double the pre-acquisition revenue relatively soon. So it is a fast growing market, we are having a lot of success with it and you know we believe that it will continue to be a strategic fast growing market, so.

Tom Raftery: Fantastic. Thanks a million Jeremiah. That was great.

Jeremiah Stone: Thanks for having me Tom.

Disclaimer – SAP paid for most of my travel, food and accommodation expenses to attend this event.

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Smart meter electricity usage data and energy services

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Senior citizen

Utility companies face significant challenges in the coming years, not least of which is the the need to increase revenues while helping customers reduce their consumption.

One trump card they will have is the data from their smart meter rollouts. This will enable them to offer energy services around the data which would not previously have been possible.

Simple examples of this are the ability to alert people if their consumption is about to tip them into a higher tariff band or, for people with holiday homes, a notification if the lights turn on when their property is supposed to be unoccupied.

These would be quite basic offerings – but with a little bit of thought one can imagine other higher value options.

Consider that according to the US Census Bureau:

The world?s 65-and-older population is projected to triple by midcentury, from 516 million in 2009 to 1.53 billion in 2050.

Further, there are currently 30 million solo-single households in the United States (more than the number of households containing married couples with children) and about one-third of these solo singles are men and women 65 years of age and older. The percentage is even higher in Europe.

Now, if I have an elderly relative living alone, wouldn’t it be a very useful service if I could receive a timely message from their utility company if there are deviations from the normal patterns of energy usage (if the lights aren’t turned off at 11pm or the coffee machine/kettle isn’t powered up at 8am)?

This kind of service should be quite straightforward for electricity utilities to provide once they start receiving the detailed energy usage data which smart meters will deliver. This will enable utilities to transition to becoming suppliers of energy services and open up entirely new revenue streams for them.

Photo credit gagilas

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SAP’s sustainability customers are talking up SAP!

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Cash register

When I interviewed SAP’s Jeremiah Stone last May about SAP’s Sustainability story at SapphireNow, he mentioned that SAP was committed to an increasing focus on sustainability customer success stories

I?m excited to hear less about SAP being sustainable in our vision and a lot more about SAP?s customers embedding our technology to have more sustainable business and more sustainable products of their own.

At SapphireNow, according to Jeremiah, around 80% of the Sustainability events were customer-led.

SAP seems to have continued that momentum, having recently published a series of videos of customers talking to SAP about how SAP’s sustainability solutions boosted their Sustainability programs. There are interviews with Lexmark, CSC, Dow, Air Products, amongst others.

It is one thing to be reporting on your own sustainability initiatives, as SAP do in their online Sustainability Report, but quite another when you can roll out customers who are willing to go on record saying your products helped them become more sustainable. That definitely helps take the credibility up a notch.

Now, imagine if you could quantify the sustainability savings your customers have achieved as a result of deploying your software…

Photo credit skpy

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SAP starts highlighting sustainability customer success stories

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I had a great chat with SAP’s Jeremiah Stone (Senior Director, Sustainability Solution Management) while we were at Sapphire Now in May. Craig Cmehil was good enough to video it for us, so here we are talking about SAP’s Sustainability solutions and SAP’s move to letting its customers recount their sustainability success stories.

Here is the transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hey everyone; we?re at SAPPHIRE NOW. I?m Tom Raftery, and, with me, I have Jeremiah Stone from SAP. Jeremiah, can you tell us, first of all, what?s your role at SAP?

Jeremiah Stone: Hi Tom! Thanks for having me, I?m glad to be here on GreenMonk. I?m part of the Solution Management Organization within SAP for Sustainability. So, we?re really responsible for the roadmap and investment in our products and working with our customers to understand what their needs are and making sure that we have the right products to meet those needs.

Tom Raftery: Okay. Just before we get in to the whole SAPPHIRE NOW thing and what?s been happening here, what are the, products that you guys have around sustainability?

Jeremiah Stone: We have a wide range and it?s a good question, because sustainability means all things to all people and, I think, Vinnie Mirchandani said, ?Don?t talk about religion, don?t talk about politics, and now don?t talk about sustainability, because it?s such a hot topic.?

SAP defines sustainability as products that help our customers? businesses succeed not only in the traditional sense of what we always do to the profitable business, but also how to stay in business for the long-run. So, in a world with changing resource situations with volatility around natural resources, needs to curb pollution, be able to grow a workforce, be able to have more sustainable products, we build products that help customers have better run businesses.

So very concretely, software that helps you have a safer business, identify risk and have improvements in people, not getting hurt, which is a nice way to have a longer-term business – you?re not hurting your employees, you make that a box.

So, we have product compliance solutions to help people design and take better products to the market that have less toxicity in them, for example. One of my favorite example there is Molex that makes little connectors in computers. They were able to remove halogens from those connectors so they have a less toxic product then.

In the long-run where you have an end of life because it has no use in your home and it is off gas or that sort of gas. We make products for energy and environmental resource management. So, really how to cut your energy use and emit less. We have solutions focused on sustainable workforce. How do you engage your employees that are on the top for sustainability? Then also in a long-term have the long-term workforce. That?s really the analytics layer and how do you make the decisions on the basis of your business data. So, we have products in each of these categories.

Tom Raftery: Awesome, and, I?ve been at a couple of Sapphires at this point. In the last couple of Sapphires there was a lot of talk from the CEO?s on downwards about sustainability. This year less so. There seems to be a shift in focus. Can you talk a bit about that?

Jeremiah Stone: Well, I think that reflects to a degree the maturity of the topic and I think it?s not necessarily a topic where they are excited about it in the sense that it is new and defining. It?s now, I think, reaching the point where and I?m excited about this, because when things get mundane and boring it usually means you make someone successful with them.

Now, it?s assumed that sustainability is going to be on the floor, it?s assumed that we?re going to be focusing on it, it?s assumed that its part of it. And you did hear about it in the keynotes, but it just blends in. Vishal Sikka talked about it today that one of our on-demand products in sustainability will be adopting in-memory technology.

So, a lot of the major technology investments that companies make around mobility, around in memory analytics, these sorts of things are part of our investment strategy and portfolio for sustainability. Now, it just becomes assumed with SAP products that we?re focusing on sustainability, which is what makes me excited as a solutions guide for that is that we don?t think if it is a separate category that we have to crow about; it now becomes part of our business.

SAP?s purpose is to help the world run better, to create enduring prosperity for people everywhere and that sustainability is just part of that purpose.

Tom Raftery: Sure and there seems to be a lot more customer sustainability events going on this month than ever before?

Jeremiah Stone: Absolutely, and that was great. I think something on the order 80% of the activities we?re doing – the forums, the customer roundtables, those are the things that were led by our customers using the products and it?s a great…

Tom Raftery: From what I was seeing, it seems to be a lot — this event, the whole SAPPHIRE NOW thing seemed to be a lot more on sustainability from the bottom-up rather than the top-down.

Jeremiah Stone: Absolutely! That?s a great way to put it and we were talking about this before. I?m excited to hear less about SAP being sustainable in our vision and a lot more about SAP?s customers embedding our technology to have more sustainable business and more sustainable products of their own.

That?s what we?re really starting to see in this you know there?s a lag when people buy the software and implement it and start to use it. I think we?re through that lag phase and it?s just great to see the momentum and the tipping point pass and people are starting to use this and then customers? getting up and being really proud about the successes they?re having and how it?s helping their business.

Tom Raftery: Awesome. Jeremiah, that?s been fantastic, thanks again.

Jeremiah Stone: Alright, thanks Tom, I appreciate it.

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Top 14 IBM achievements in the last 100 years

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IBM turned 100 earlier this month – a significant achievement for any company, but for one in the constantly shifting sands that is the technology industry, it is particularly notable.

As part of the celebrations, they released the video above outlining 100 of their achievements during that time. The video is beautifully executed and it is a great IBM marketing tool. It is easy to see that the video has a strong sales message towards the end (which tbh, is a tad unnecessary) but the earlier content is definitely worthy of comment.

Some of the highlights for me were:

  1. In 1914, 76 years before the US Disabilities Act, IBM hired its first disabled employee
  2. In 1930 IBM receives its first patent for a traffic signal timing system
  3. In 1932 IBM started education programs for employees and customers
  4. In 1934 IBM introduces group life insurance (in the midst of the Great Depression)
  5. In 1935 IBM opens the first professional training school for women
  6. In 1941, IBM hired a legally blind employee, psychologist Dr. Michael Supa, to make its products more usable by the visually impaired and to assist in the hiring of 181 people with disabilities over the following two years
  7. In 1942 IBM launches a disabled employee training program
  8. In 1943 Ruth Leach Amonette is elected IBM’s first female Vice President
  9. In 1946 IBM hires T.J. Laster, their first black sales representative, 18 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964
  10. In 1953 IBM chairman Thomas Watson issues the company’s first Equal Opportunity Policy letter
  11. In 1967 IBM employee Benoit Mandelbrot ask’s How long is the Coast of Britain and a new branch of mathematics (fractal geometry) is born
  12. In 1981 IBM introduces the first IBM PC
  13. In 2004 IBM creates the World Community Grid – a public grid computing project to tackle scientific research projects that benefit humanity
  14. And in 2008-9 IBM creates the Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities programs.

Other highlights include inventions of the ATM, the barcode, and DRAM; the fact that at least 3 IBM’ers have won Nobel Prizes; and IBM’s Deep Blue beating world champion chess player Gary Kasparov.

It is easy to criticise this video by saying it is nothing but a sales pitch – but the strong sales message is only really in the final two minutes of the video (from 11:14-13:15) – if you stop the video at that point, you miss nothing and get see for yourself the list of their achievements.

These are just my favourites, what are yours?

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Why would you feature oil companies as customer references?

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Oiled Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation

The BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico was, unfortunately, far from being an isolated incident. Chevron in Ecuador, Shell in Nigeria, Exxon in Alaska – name me an oil company and I’ll name you an environmental disaster. And, it appears that some of them are responsible for funding, climate change denial.

And yet at a number of conferences I’ve been at recently, oil companies have been mentioned as customer references from the podium. From my position as an advocate of green measures, that irks.

Hasso Plattner keynoting the Sapphire Now conference

At SAP’s Sapphire Now conference last week for example, during the keynotes given by Vishal Sikka, CTO, and Hasso Plattner, Chair and co-founder of SAP, three oil companies were featured. And this is a company which is going to great pains to establish a reputation for itself as being being Sustainable.

It is not like SAP were short of customer references – there were probably north of 30 customers shown between the two back-to-back keynotes. No-one would have complained if there were three less.

So, they had oil companies, ok, well to counter that how many of the other customer companies represented were renewable generators? Not one. Not a single one.

C’mon guys, it’s not like renewable generators have a shortage of big data – I remember on visiting Logica’s center of excellence in Lisbon seeing their windfarm management application. They told me that a typical turbine outputs around 250 data points per minute and that particular application was managing over 2,000 wind turbines.

Leaving Logica aside, there are plenty of other well known companies heavily involved in renewables who could have been showcased – think Siemens, Vestas, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Iberdrola, Hyundai, GE, Gamesa, and Alstom for wind energy; then there’s Bosch, Sharp, and Sanyo for solar, for example.

In fairness to SAP, one of their demos, from UK energy retailer Centrica, was a Smart Meter Analytics demo where Centrica was able to utilise the analytics to help consumers reduce their power consumption – more on which in another post.

And, I should not ignore that fact that oil companies such as BP have invested in renewables but is that where their focus really is? SAP is pushing the sustainability agenda and for that they should be given credit. But… show us the evidence in the real world of customers that SAP is supporting.

That’s how you gain credibility.

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Photo credit NOAA’s National Ocean Service