ESS Makes Big Splash at Oracle’s OpenWorld

I’m just returning from Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, which was a huge success for ESS on several fronts. During a conference filled with major Oracle announcements about its new hardware and software products, we garnered significant attention for our software solutions.

The big kahuna event was a joint presentation in which I joined Oracle’s Vice President Product Strategy, to provide details about the joint solution that ESS and Oracle will deliver to meet growing demand for operational sustainability information management systems. It was a big draw and generated some buzz in the media and the blogosphere. This was a big deal and I’ll talk more about it later.

I joined Oracle’s Vice President Supply Chain Execution and Product Lifecycle Management Strategy and Senior Vice President of Application Development to present a powerful presentation — the first at OpenWorld — announcing the partnership and presenting ESS as the “Eco-Hub” of the Oracle’s GRC solution. An Oracle press release and joint solution description were distributed in conjunction with the presentation.

ESS Vice President Ian Achterkirch was a featured presenter, along with panelists from Intuit, Intel and other companies, in a lively discussion on sustainability issues. Ian delivered a great presentation explaining ESS’ accomplishments in this arena.

Also, ESS and Alcoa were recipients of Oracle’s inaugural “Empower the Green Enterprise” which recognized companies for adopting green business practices, including effective use of Oracle advanced information technologies in order to protect the environment, reduce costs and risks and enhance operational efficiency.

Throughout the week we continued building the relationship at meetings and offsite events with senior Oracle executives.

Our success at OpenWorld confirms that there’s tremendous market interest in enterprise sustainability. We’re excited about partnering with Oracle to help more companies reach their sustainability goals.

Add comment September 25th, 2008

Chinese Energy Companies Showing Leadership in Sustainability

While I was in Asia last week, I met with the CIO of PetroChina and China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) and learned of his desire to expand on our great success consolidating all applications in the Environmental Health and Safety arena into one platform for efficiency and centralized reporting. I was really impressed when he told me they have more than 70,000 users.

This has to be the largest EHS sustainability platform ever deployed. He also told me it was the first and “only” software within PetroChina and CNPC that has been deployed across the entire company. We want to enhance our value to their business users by providing tools like role-based Key Performance Indicators to help them improve performance within their specific business units.

I also met with the CIO of China Light and Power (CLP) in Hong Kong. This is meaningful because CLP is followed and benchmarked as best of breed throughout Asia for its best practices in using information technology to enhance business value. He gave me a tour of the company’s technology center, which was quite impressive, and we spent a good deal of time talking about translating technology investments like ESS software into real business value.

These CIOs are true thought leaders and our plan with them in the area of GHG emissions management and corporate responsibility reporting will set the standard not only in Asia but across the world. For those of us who think our companies are in the vanguard of sustainability, here’s a word of caution: Look out. You may just find yourself following leaders from Asia.

Add comment September 25th, 2008