Data visualization is an important part of Salesforce’s Sustainability Cloud, with which customers can track their impact on the environment.
Salesforce Sustainability Cloud helps customers reduce their carbon footprint
Data visualization is an important part of Salesforce’s Sustainability Cloud, with which customers can track their impact on the environment.
At Dreamforce 2019 in San Francisco, Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic spoke with Salesforce’s VP or Sustainability Patrick Flynn and GM or Sustainability Cloud Ari Alexander about the company’s Sustainability Cloud. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
Bill Detwiler: Keeping track of sustainability is important for companies who want to reduce their carbon footprint, and here at Dreamforce 2019 I am delighted to be here with two gentlemen to talk about what Salesforce is doing in terms of sustainability and a new product they have, Sustainability Cloud.
Patrick Flynn and Ari Alexander are here with me. Patrick, let’s start with you. Talk about Salesforce’s efforts in sustainability and how to incorporate this into everything that Salesforce does.
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Patrick Flynn: The environment is an important stakeholder for Salesforce. When we think about our values of trust, innovation, customer success, equality, we are driven to be a leader in environmental responsibility. I am very happy with how mature many of our core programs are now. You know, when a company like Salesforce starts its environmental journey, it’s really important to think about what the biggest impact areas we have – as a cloud company that has to do with our data centers and the electricity they use, our offices , our employees, business trips, in all those areas where we have had great success recently.
For example, all our products are carbon neutral. We are on the way to 100% renewable energy. We touch that in FY22. Among our employees, we have one in five parts of our Earthforce group that do many things around the world to have a local impact on the environment. Because we have reached this maturity in our main programming areas, it is time to think about those initiatives that have an opportunity to make an impact on a planetary scale. What are the environmental initiatives that can produce results that are one hundred X – one thousand X – larger than Salesforce? We are starting to think about involving the investor community, entering into our supply chain and – in a very big, exciting new way – thinking about our use of technology in the hands of our customers, allowing them to transform their business .
Bill Detwiler: So Ari, let’s jump straight into Sustainability Cloud, because the goal is to help Salesforce customers track their sustainability efforts. Tell me about the product itself and how your customers use or can use it.
Ari Alexander: Just as we have always helped our customers with all types of transformations they face – whether it is the transition to mobile or social or to AI – customers are increasingly asking us to work with them, with technology and with advice on how to deal with a rapidly changing climate. The Sustainability Cloud really helps them embark on that journey by placing trusted data on a trusted platform that helps them get an idea of what their impact on the environment is. For most of our customers this is a brand new exercise, and for many who have done this for many years like us, many business improvements still need to be made to become more efficient and focus on strategic work, rather than the inefficiencies of data collection .
Bill Detwiler: I know that Tableau is one of the most important acquisitions that Salesforce has recently made. That is something that I think is very important when we talk about a subject such as sustainability and reporting – it is able to visualize all this data that we collect. Talk about how Sustainability Cloud helps companies to tell that story about their sustainability efforts. What kind of visualizations can they get? What type of data can be processed? Can they collect? Can they analyze?
Ari Alexander: You are absolutely right that a small number of people within a company are responsible for that data collection – to find out what their carbon footprint is – but there are many people who are really interested in its output. This is where data visualization has a powerful task in translating between matter experts and the rest of us who want to know: what is our environmental impact and where do we need to take action? In the Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, we have pre-built dashboard templates to show a C-level executive how your CO2 footprint is falling apart? In which parts of your company? In which regions? They can quickly see where they must first take action.
Bill Detwiler: Patrick, talking about the different stakeholders in an organization who are responsible for these sustainability efforts, how do you take the C-level efforts? Push that through the rest of the organization and then push it across large multinational companies with tens of thousands of employees worldwide and make them kind of involved in sustainable business?
Patrick Flynn: It is reminiscent of one of the best phenomena here at Salesforce and in the sustainability ecosystem worldwide, which is the spirit of collaboration. We are all behind the same goal: to make the planet better for future generations. Ari said there is a phenomenon where the gap between those who have access to trusted data and the senior members of the company who had to make strategic decisions is widening. Being able to generate confidential data on Sustainability Cloud and then being able to visualize it on the mobile device of the manager – of the member of the board of directors – to inform their strategic decision-making process. That is a completely different way in which a sustainability team will operate in the future. The way it is happening now is that it is usually a team with insufficient resources that spends a lot of time collecting data over a very long period. By the time they control it, it is outdated and they cannot move at the pace of the business or have the types of conversations that are required at the level that is required of them.
Bill Detwiler: Ari, from your point of view, how is it possible? Sustainability Cloud can help companies move quickly? To move its scale and with speed?
Ari Alexander: We see around 8,000 companies participating in this global conversation so far by counting their carbon footprint, and we have more than 150,000 customers. The vast majority of our customers are looking for a place to start, and for them they will be guided for the first time in going through their carbon footprinting exercise and soon find that they can translate what that exercise is like to those who wanted to know what came out. They will not have the resources and the time and the people to really do all that kind of calculations and data visualization themselves.
We have really tried to pack it and make it very accessible for the first time that carbon accountants are working, and to our great joy we also notice that people who have been doing this for years tell us they would do it too, because it is valuable because they have been working in spreadsheets for years and that it has been a very painful process. We really feel that we are putting this issue on the market at a time when there is a huge rising demand to speed up the accounting process and find out how climate action can be taken in every sector in every region.
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