Evolving Corporate Sustainability Solutions: An Interview with Sebastien Duprez & Nina Zellweger
As the world continues to feel the pressure of climate change, more and more actors in the private sector are implementing solutions to reduce their carbon emissions and slow down global warming.
For many organizations, technology is a major focus in their carbon reduction strategy. And most emissions are linked to digital workplace equipment. In fact, the workplace represents 70% of overall IT-related emissions. For example, for every new manufactured laptop, an average of 316kg of CO2 is created, 190,000 litres of water is used and 1,200 kg of virgin earth and rock is mined. For IT professionals and CSR/sustainability leaders the imperative is clear: we must invest in a sustainable IT strategy.
In addition to corporate initiatives to reduce digital impact, existing and upcoming legislation oblige businesses to manage their operations in a more transparent, responsible and sustainable manner.
In this interview with Sebastien Duprez, Senior Technical Partner Manager at Nexthink, and Nina Zellweger, ESG Lead, we’ll discuss how the corporate world is finding solutions to drastically reduce digital impact on the environment and avoid regulatory risks, and how Nexthink partners with MSPs to deliver sustainable solutions.
Sebastien, as you work with global MSP Partners and with Atos in particular, are they altering their service offerings to meet the demands of businesses seeking sustainability support?
Yes, all the global players have been developing sustainability initiatives for several years. All of our partners understand their responsibility to tackle climate change and understand that by focusing on sustainability efforts, they create sustainable and long-term value for their customers, their investors, their employees and their communities.
At the same time, their level of maturity varies significantly. The majority of global MSPs have built some form of sustainability offering, with the most mature having developed a robust portfolio of services.
For all MSPs, the foundational offering is going to be sustainability consultancy. This can include a carbon footprint assessment, defining a decarbonization roadmap, and more.
With increasing maturity, the MSPs usually develop ‘Green IT’ services, which involve managing the CO2 emissions of modern cloud foundations.
For our most advanced partners, they offer a ‘Sustainable Digital Workplace’ offering. This offering helps customers reduce the impact of their digital workplace hardware by assessing device manufacturing, extending the lifecycle of their devices, applying circular economy strategies to their digital workplace management, and more.
Atos has even committed to including Decarbonization Level Agreements in their contracts.
What are the key sustainability challenges that MSPs help their customer address?
When companies initiate a decarbonization strategy, the first step is to measure current emissions. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t track. However, in an era of data overload and increasing legal requirements, it can be hard to even know where to start. Hence, MSPs can guide companies to measure the data that is most relevant to their business.
MSP are also helping their customers transform the way they do business by targeting emissions from their hotspots in manufacturing, supply chain, travel, and other areas.
Another sustainability challenge organizations face is employee engagement. While many employees want to work for companies committed to sustainability, they may not understand how their own behavior impacts carbon emissions. MSPs can provide innovative solutions that help their customers raise awareness and increase employee engagement on sustainability within their organization. For example, providing information during the onboarding process is a great way to help employees understand what behaviors and practices they can adopt to help reduce their carbon footprint.
Nina, what are the key challenges facing organizations that want to start investing in sustainability?
Due to the pressing nature of the subject, regulations and requirements are becoming more complex year after year. This puts pressure on organizations to keep informed of those changes and work closely with legal teams to ensure they remain compliant.
In addition, from calculating carbon footprint to preparing for new reporting directives such CSRD for example, sustainability initiatives require different skills and knowledge which sometimes force companies to seek external support. While this might change in the near future, today it’s very rare to find one profile that can guide your organization through every facet of your sustainability initiative. This means more investment as you need to find multiple consultants to guide each area.
When a company starts committing to decarbonization strategies, it must rethink the way it used to do business. Decarbonization impacts all business operations. For this reason, it is crucial to have management buy-in to ensure the objectives are met.
With that being said, Sebastien, can you tell us how does the Nexthink platform help MSPs with their offerings?
The Nexthink Infinity Cloud platform plays a strategic role in the Sustainability offerings of multiple MSPs.
First, as mentioned earlier, what cannot be measured cannot be improved. Our Nexthink Collector gathers important data and metrics from end user devices, then uses that data to populate dashboards (both out-of-the-box or built by our partners) providing accurate insights on emissions linked to devices, servers, peripherals, etc. These insights help customers report progress to stakeholders.
Also, our Employee Engagement campaign capabilities help increase awareness of environmental and sustainability topics and drive behavioral changes. For example, businesses can use campaigns to benchmark employee maturity, share facts about IT energy usage or share surveys to gather feedback on sustainability initiatives. Campaigns are also used to propose changes to end-users that lead them towards more sustainable IT usage (a gamification of the process).
Finally, Nexthink delivers actionable insights that enable customers to make concrete changes that drive sustainability. For instance, customers can check the power plan settings of devices and change them automatically to more energy efficient settings, correlate employee satisfaction and device performance to drive performance rather than time-based hardware refresh cycles and uncover a range of other energy intensive assets across the IT estate. These gains turn into significant savings when scaled to a whole enterprise.
Our MSP partners utilize the Nexthink Infinity platform to help IT organizations and their customers run efficient actions and measure success in achieving their corporate environmental sustainability goals, without jeopardizing the digital experience of employees.
Will Nexthink continue investing in enhancing its Sustainable IT solution?
Of course! Sustainability requirements are evolving at a fast pace and Nexthink will continue to develop its solution to meet market needs. To remain innovative and on track with sustainability requirements, our ESG team is partnering with our Product Solution Management team to build a solid technical product that takes into consideration sustainability requirements, customer needs, and global interests.
As Nexthink continues our investment and focus on automation and artificial intelligence, I have no doubt we will use these tools to continue our development of sustainability solutions for the digital workplace, driving decarbonization and NetZero transformations for our partners and customers.
