ackaged software makers are betting big on the rising software licensing opportunity as companies across the world begin to measure efforts towards various sustainability strategies such as reducing carbon emissions and ensuring safety of employees.
Sustainability strategies involve activities to ensure that the company’s business and brand does not get impacted as it moves towards greater growth path.
For instance, a manufacturing firm has to ensure its carbon emission limit remains at minimal level as it increases its production capacity.
While this involves understanding of business processes, business applications coupled with analytics systems can act as facilitator of that understanding, such as per employee carbon emission, per employee productivity output, etc.
According to SAP AG, the Germany-based world’s largest enterprise resource planning (ERP) maker, the software licensing opportunity from sustainability-related projects of firms is worth $7.3 billion between 2009 and 2013.
Among some of the major partners of SAP which integrate applications to customers’ systems are Indian IT firms such as TCS, Wipro and HP.
“IT is just about 1-2% of the whole challenge of carbon emission and sustainability,” said Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer at SAP in California, US.
Since most part of sustainability approach involves review of business operations, service providers are increasing ways to enhance their business consulting capabilities.
“Most of our partners are on that journey of consulting capability. Some BPO firms too are looking at that. Eventually those who would be able to deliver value on clients’ business insights,” said Graf.
SAP AG, which has 1,800 customer firms running one or the other SAP solutions related to sustainability efforts, has solutions such as Carbon Impact, People Health & Safety for manufacturing firms, sustainability performance management, etc besides adding enhancements to its existing business applications such as MySAP Business Suite.
The firm has 1,000 of its 50,000 employee base dedicated to its sustainability business. The firm aims a worldwide user base of 1 billion from the current 30 million.
Source:http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_sap-spots-7-billion-opportunity-in-sustainability-projects_1411609
