by Shane Henson — March 26, 2012—CarbonSystems was recently awarded a major contract with Microsoft Corp, which has adopted the company’s Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP) cloud application as its new global standard for managing its energy, efficiency and environmental-performance reporting. Microsoft’s selection may set a precedent for other global companies currently using spreadsheets to track their sustainability data.
According to Microsoft, CarbonSystems, a global provider of environmental and energy management solutions, was selected based on its ability to use cloud computing to simplify and streamline Microsoft’s global greenhouse gas management and reporting to stakeholders.
CarbonSystems’ ESP will be implemented across Microsoft’s global operations, which comprise over 600 facilities across 110 countries.
Paul Baier, vice president of sustainability consulting at Groom Energy and a senior contributor for sustainability publication GreenBiz.com, submitted an analysis of the award that concludes that the deal “definitely puts to bed the notion that spreadsheets are sufficient to track sustainability data for large, global companies,” and opines that “selection by Microsoft means that many global companies will likely now consider CarbonSystem for their future sustainability tracking and managing needs.”
ESP is a cloud-based data management engine that allows global electronic data interchange (EDI) with internal systems and third-party suppliers. Its deployment will deliver important benefits to Microsoft, including:
- Automating energy and sustainability data collection to support CDP reporting.
- Cutting the time and cost of managing corporate environmental information by automating the capture and tracking of energy, water and other environmental data from utilities and third-party suppliers.
- Providing up-to-date, auditable business and compliance reports via dashboards summarizing energy, emissions and other environmental data.
- Informing efficiency and cost-saving decisions by providing a wide range of environmental performance analytics such as benchmarking, forecasting and marginal abatement cost analysis tools.
- Verifying the impacts, return on investment and payback from efficiency initiatives.
- Cutting the time and cost of managing corporate environmental information by automating the capture and tracking of energy, water and other environmental data from utilities and third-party suppliers.
