Sustainability has moved from the fringes to the center of strategic planning for CEOs worldwide. For this reason, we recently held a survey to learn how organizations are planning for sustainability in 2023 and uncover the top sustainability approaches and roadblocks.
Join this webinar as we deliver the survey results along with strategies and ESG best practices that incentivize and grow sustainability within the organization.
Our speakers will also introduce Everest Group’s emerging philosophy for sustainability, which helps organizations remain aware of current conversations, opportunities, competitive advantages, and strategic decision-making.
Our speakers will discuss:
Who should attend?
Energy costs are rising, and sustainability is all the rage. But storage vendors may struggle to convince customers to combat climate change during an economic downturn.
As one of the main elements of IT, storage often sits on the sidelines; that is its purpose. But it also uses a disproportionate amount of power. “[Vendors must] ensure that the technology is efficient [and] decreases overall power consumption while increasing performance and capacity,” says Mukesh Ranjan, a Vice President and analyst at Everest Group.
Everest Group’s Rita N. Soni, Principal Analyst for Impact Sourcing and Sustainability, will be speaking at ALES Talks 2022 in a session titled: How to add value to Global Services?
Rita N. Soni
Principal Analyst for Impact Sourcing and Sustainability
Everest Group
Atul Vashistha
Chairman
Supply Wisdom
Yogesh Chauhan
Director of ESG, HubSpot
Facundo Cajén
Director for LATAM
GainForest
As we look toward 2023, economic uncertainty is prime and center. Rising inflation, interest rate hikes, and GDP contraction – matched with low unemployment rates and high talent demand – have left business leaders unsure of what to expect and how to prepare for 2023.
Join Everest Group’s Key Issues 2023 webinar as our experts provide insights into the outlook of the global IT-BP industry and discuss major concerns, expectations, and key trends expected to amplify in 2023.
All the data is based on input from global leaders across enterprises, Global Business Services (GBS), and service providers.
Our speakers will discuss expectations for 2023, including:
Who should attend?
Catch Everest Group’s Amardeep Modi and Harpreet Makan in this webinar as they share insights from Everest Group’s report, “Scaling Automation Across the Enterprise.” The speakers will explore key success factors and best practices enabling superior business outcomes, including:
Best approaches to scale IA adoption across multiple business functions
Key components of a holistic intelligent automation solution
Enterprises’ evolving automation vision and expected outcomes
Methods to transform business functions such as finance & accounting (F&A) through IA
Key success factors that can help enterprises scale automation across functions
Amardeep Modi
Vice President, Everest Group
Harpreet Makan
Practice Director, Everest Group
Nadia Nizar
Corporate Communications Senior Director, SS&C Blue Prism
Service providers who lead in green engineering and can produce significantly more carbon-efficient software have an opportunity to price their sustainable IT services at higher premiums and pioneer this emerging space. Read on to explore more on IT services pricing in today’s ESG-focused marketplace.
In the book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, Bill Gates popularizes the concept of a Green Premium. Simply put, a Green Premium is the incremental charge/cost that buyers must pay to use a clean technology over a “dirty” one.
Now, this isn’t a new notion by any means. Consumers pay more for products that are marked “organic” and happily shell out extra bucks for greener packaging or responsibly-sourced coffee. Green Premiums exist because organizations typically incur more costs to deliver cleaner products and services. But they also generate pricing power due to differentiation.
This concept has mostly restricted itself to mass usage products in a business-to-consumer setting. Can IT service providers replicate this in the enterprise technology marketplace? By introducing sustainability into the technology services, is there a case for a Green Premium?
We believe two distinct paths can lead to a Green Premium in IT services pricing – an external-facing route and an internal one. Let’s explore the external opportunity first.
While building software, the most important priorities are typically user-centric – user experience, performance, latency, security, etc. Developing carbon-efficient software has never been a core objective. And in the process, the impact of emerging technologies has largely gone unnoticed. Only recently has a host of research been published pointing out the tremendous negative impact the likes of blockchain and artificial intelligence could have on the planet. For example, according to a study performed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, training a single Artificial Intelligence model can cause as much carbon emission as five cars in their lifetimes. No one saw that coming!
But we do see emerging signs of this changing. There is an industry-wide push towards greener software development practices. This includes steps such as considering the carbon impact of architectural decisions, choosing more energy-efficient languages, using data practices that reduce redundancy, and building more hardware-efficient applications. Given that this is an emerging field, there is no single service provider who does it better. And this creates a unique opportunity for service providers to aim for leadership in this blue ocean and materially differentiate their services
Providers who can lead in green software engineering and produce significantly more carbon-efficient software will differentiate themselves from competitors around parameters that genuinely matter to enterprises today. Alongside typical cost savings quoted in most proposals, future slide decks might have a percentage reduction in carbon emissions as one of the key benefits to the enterprise.
Now, let’s explore the internal route that could lead to Green Premiums. Alongside providing green software engineering practices, service providers need to focus on achieving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. A provider who leads in green software engineering but scores low on ESG metrics might not be able to establish credibility with clients.
Sooner than later, enterprises will inevitably start to consider ESG as a key parameter in their sourcing strategy. Traditionally, ESG parameters were mere check-the-box or good-to-have selection criteria. But according to Everest Group research, they are now becoming deal-breakers – or makers – in many instances. We expect to start seeing enterprises look for energy efficiency, impact sourcing, community impact, board-level governance, and transparency/disclosure standards. Service providers who score high on these metrics will be able to materially differentiate themselves against the competition.
The primary challenge in this entire process lies in being able to calculate the exact Green Premium of sustainable IT services. No consensus exists yet. Both internal-facing ESG initiatives and cutting-edge green software engineering practices require investments from service providers and are inherently more expensive. A first mover in this space will face this challenge but also have an opportunity to literally set the benchmark.
In an increasingly commoditized industry, ESG offers promise for technology service providers to set themselves apart by creating truly differentiated services. As any ardent observer of the industry will acknowledge, such occasions are few and far between.
Are you a service provider aiming for leadership in this space? As an enterprise, are your providers exploring this opportunity to the fullest? Let me know by reaching out to [email protected] to discuss the emerging topic of ESG and its impact on IT services pricing.
Also, don’t miss our webinar, Key Issues for 2023: Rise Above Economic Uncertainty and Succeed, as we explore major concerns, expectations, and key trends expected to amplify in 2023.
Global Business Services (GBS) organizations have a big opportunity to champion Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) in banking and financial services (BFS) institutions. To learn about six ways GBS organizations can help enterprises reach their ESG goals and unlock greater value, read on.
ESG is creating new opportunities for BFS Global Business Services organizations. Fast-evolving consumer awareness about social, political, and environmental values, emerging regulations, and increased demand for sustainable financial products are pressuring BFS firms to prioritize ESG goals in operations and employment.
Let’s explore the significant role GBS units can play in enabling ESG for enterprises.
To meet new customer and investor expectations along with regulatory mandates, BFS organizations are building ESG products and services – such as green loans, sustainability-linked loans, and carbon-neutral banking – to make their operations sustainable.
Capital market firms are embracing green underwriting, while asset and wealth managers are steadily moving toward ESG investing. These organizations are also focusing on workplace diversity, pay equity, and good governance structure to meet their ESG aspirations.
This has created a big opportunity for GBS organizations to move from being measured for their labor arbitrage and cost efficiency to the value they can deliver to enterprises. These units can become vital to the enterprise’s ESG agenda by expanding their sustainable service offerings and conducting ESG-specific due diligence and risk assessment. GBS centers’ strong visibility across the enterprise’s functions, operations, and capabilities to support their ESG initiatives will drive this new focus.
As BFS organizations increasingly look for ways to support and grow their businesses with an impact-driven mindset, GBS organizations should be at the forefront of defining and internalizing ESG goals.
The new environment has opened up many avenues for GBS organizations to maximize the value they can deliver and become ESG enablers for their enterprises. For a deep dive into the opportunities summarized below, please read our newly released research.
See how GBS organizations can promote ESG initiatives within the enterprise in the image below.
GBS organizations can enable the following key opportunities for BFS firms:
As GBS organizations take on more strategic roles, it becomes imperative for them to step up and become ESG enablers for their enterprises. To do this, GBS leadership must champion the development of ESG-specific capabilities and prioritize initiatives to drive enterprises’ ESG agendas, while embedding ESG and sustainability practices into their service delivery and operations.
To discuss how we can assist your enterprise with achieving your ESG goals, reach out to Sakshi Garg [email protected], Piyush Dubey [email protected], and Mohini Jindal [email protected].
Discover more about how to integrate sustainability and ESG initiatives into your organization in our upcoming webinar, Driving Larger-scale Adoption of Impact Sourcing from the Inside Out.
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