Siemens
17 September 2009Any organisation spending over £500,000 a year on electricity that does not have a plan for sustainable business will soon to fall foul of UK Government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) legislation.
Have your say - Vote on this video.
Speaker Key
MK Matt Key
CM Clark MacFarlane
MK: I think, just briefly, the IT for sustainability offering from Siemens is delivered in two broad phases. Firstly, we do a sustainability health check where we assess, not just the IT estate, but water consumption, energy consumption, how people are travelling to and from work, etc, etc. What that naturally allows us then to do is develop a very defined, a bespoke set of actions to allow us to not only drive out budget savings, but also ensure that we do that in light of being a more sustainable organisation. From our perspective, our sustainability for IT offering allows you to do both. Naturally we are looking to do an assessment and develop action plans as to how you might utilise your IT estate more efficiently to support your services – and by that I mean lower cost. But in terms of bringing the sustainability aspect to it and, importantly, the carbon impact, we can not only develop an action plan and work with you to drive out cost savings in the IT estate, but also drive out the carbon impact, improve the sustainability of that IT estate. Any organisation, for example, that spends over half a million pounds on electricity is going to be mandated to look at the way they operate in a more sustainable way by the carbon reduction commitment. So this is not only a sensible thing to do from a budget perspective, but it’s going to become a legal requirement to do that, as well as ensuring that you’re driving sustainability. And we feel that only Siemens can offer those two things in parallel.
CM: In the current economic crisis you should be ensuring that your cost optimisation is the lowest possible, therefore, your energy usage in your IT system should be cost effective. You need to use that as an advantage. But also, you need to look to the future. You’re a business that wants to be around for a long term; you need a partner that’s going to be around for a long term. Therefore, somebody that can help you through this with the costs of today, help you maybe finance it and plan for tomorrow, they’re vital.
MK: The reason why we look at this differently is because Siemens is a wide organisation - a €80 billion organisation - derives around about a quarter of that revenue from sustainable business at this point in time. It’s built into the design, development and deployment of our products and services to our customers that they have to be sustainable. Siemens IT for sustainability offering is innovative, because we approach it in a slightly different way. We come at this from a much broader perspective. And this is what allows us to differentiate, because the breadth of Siemens and its understanding of energy production, energy transmission, load balancing and also important aspects of our Siemens mobility division, understanding what carbon impact, what the sustainability is of people travelling to and from work, allows us to take a more holistic view of the end to end of the service. It’s part of Siemens’ genes to develop innovation that’s in a sustainable fashion for its markets, its products and its customers.
