Global Market Conditions Provide Impetus for Innovation, Sustainability

As we enter Q3 2008, the cable news channels are spouting their gloom-and-doom predictions, and the market is volatile. The price of oil’s up one day and down the next and everyone’s looking at their budgets. At the same time, a slew of new sustainability initiatives and regulations are inviting the enterprise to take a look at everything from supply chain to manufacturing to packaging.

The advantage of my age is that this isn’t my first business cycle rodeo. I have been here before. Watching the signs in the economy, I remember how we managed ESS through the last cycle, and how much we have learned about focus, about operational excellence and customer loyalty. Fortunately, we emerged from that downturn as a market leader, and we are going to continue our global growth and bring our customers with us. We are agile, and we pride ourselves on our quick response.

This time around, we find ourselves relatively rich in resources, especially people, to help us focus on our market leadership goals. We are doing what we encourage our customers to do: greening our company, monitoring and measuring our energy use and challenging ourselves to model the behavior we like to see in others. We will lower our own carbon footprint, question our expenditures for items like inter-office travel (could we do this with a videoconference?) and use the cost savings generated from being a sustainable company to help us maintain our industry lead.

For you, our customers, this is a time to focus on the operational efficiencies that can be gained from uniting silos of information into integrated platforms that give the executive team accurate information to make decisions in response to quick changes in the business environment. We have an aggressive product road map to help you do this, including mobile platforms. We are integrating all our offerings so they will gather data from the local to the global, presenting it as actionable information in reports that will be used for corporate governance.

Essential Suite 7.1 is really an enterprise sustainability platform, and we’re moving it further in that direction, integrating new features constantly and taking our lead from you, the customers we serve. As always, we are watching the regulatory changes, such as REACH, that impact you, and developing tools to help you not only deal with them, but turn them to your advantage.

We’ve had some big, important sales wins in Q2, but they don’t make us overconfident. Rather, they humble us. You have put your trust in us and we are going to keep earning your trust every day.

Add comment July 17th, 2008