KEY POINTS:
The business community's stampede to embrace green initiatives presents a lucrative marketing opportunity for IT companies.
Cutting back the corporate "carbon footprint" has become a hot topic in boardrooms around the globe as companies latch on to the notion that going green is a means to saving money
and generating good PR. Oh, and making a contribution to rescuing the planet in the process isn't a bad spin-off, either.
Enter the IT industry with a plethora of technology initiatives aimed at cutting carbon generation.
Order a computer from Dell and you get the option of paying a few extra dollars to cover the planting of a tree to offset the carbon emitted during the PC manufacturing process.
On another level, internet infrastructure company Cisco System's chief executive, John Chambers, was in Sydney last month talking up his company's high-end video conferencing systems. Chambers' message was that as well as cutting corporate travel costs, video-conferencing is the environmentally-friendly way to go.
It's perhaps a little ironic that spreading the video-conferencing message in this part of the world still involved Chambers flying the Cisco company jet down from corporate HQ in San Jose, California. But, hey, sometimes you just need to be there to press the flesh.
Meanwhile, software company SAP sees a growing niche in helping its customers deal with "emissions management" issues - the business of tracking and auditing the movements of carbon through a business.
At SAP's Sapphire'07 customer conference in Vienna last week, the company's head of business user development, Doug Merritt, said as a global software supplier to big business and industry, SAP was well placed to deal with the complex task of sniffing out carbon trails.
"To really help organisations get to a quantification of their carbon footprint it's not just emissions in a production process," he told the Business Herald.
"It's composition of the product. What carbon expenditure in aggregate goes into that product from your subcontractors and suppliers? What expenditure are your employees making as they travel to different locations to try to build or serve that product? What expenditures is your supply chain experiencing as you're pulling in components and pushing them back out? What kind of carbon expenditure do you have through your service chain, your field personnel?"
Fascinating questions to pose if you are a global software company that makes money selling systems that push around stacks of data, but do businesses really care that much about tracking carbon? They should, according to SAP's marketing bumph.
"How crucial is emissions management?" one company pamphlet asks rhetorically.
"A simple cost-benefit analysis puts the issue into stark relief: Demonstrate a record of compliance and your company can build valuable goodwill with regulatory authorities and the public. Fail to comply and your company could face crippling fines or even lose its operating permits."
The wider picture here is that in the wake of recent corporate governance scandals and burgeoning environmental enlightenment, boring stuff like monitoring to ensure your company doesn't break the law has become big business.
A year ago SAP set up a "governance, risk and compliance" division. Despite its dreary name, the division's revenue has been growing by 300 per cent quarter-on-quarter, thanks to enthusiasm for concepts like triple bottom-line reporting.
"Sustainability has finally become a topic where there is significant institutional shareholder value that they are now demanding transparency simply beyond financial reporting," said Amit Chatterjee, who leads the compliance unit.
Yes, avoiding risk in business is so 1990s, apparently. Today's buzzword adjectives for the go-ahead business are "risk-intelligent" and "risk-agile". Cashing in on the greening of business certainly seems to be a good call if you are a risk-intelligent global software company like SAP looking for new products and services to offer corporate clients.
The greening of business looks set to be good news for SAP's shareholders as well as the planet.
* Simon Hendery travelled to Sapphire'07 as a guest of SAP
