A recent article on CNET reported that SAP is trying to get ahead of the curve in environmental sustainability. An excerpt of it has been reproduced below.
What’s an enterprise software company doing getting into sustainability? After all, the environmental footprint from software production pales in comparison to resource-intensive industries such as power generation or even running data centers that deliver Web services such as search. SAP’s customers are businesses, which need to comply with regulations, such as reporting greenhouse gas emissions or tracking hazardous substances it may use. /SAP is designing software to manage environmental and social aspects of a business, which can contribute to the bottom line or lower risk. For example, an obvious way to hedge against the volatile price of oil is to use less of it. But that’s just one of many natural resources–water, metals, food, energy–that companies can manage more intelligently.
That’s where software comes in. Enterprise applications make their mark in business by automating processes such as managing a supply chain. Now, there are tools to manage the natural resources companies use. Last month, SAP released a hosted application called Sustainability Performance Management, a dashboard to track factors such as a company’s carbon footprint or water use.
For the full article, including Q&A with Peter Graf, who last March was named chief sustainability officer at the Germany-based software heavyweight, can be read here.