Accenture, Microsoft, and Avanade join forces to help businesses become sustainable

Accenture and Microsoft, together with their joint venture Avanade, are collaborating to tackle climate change, with an immediate emphasis on delivering solutions to help organizations transform their operations, products, services, and value chains to help accelerate the transition to net zero.

The three companies will expand their focus to broader environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges in the future.

The companies are investing in the co-development of innovative solutions—architected and designed at the onset to emit less carbon over their life cycle—and offering advisory services to help businesses reduce carbon emissions, speed the transition to new energy sources, and shrink or even eliminate waste of finite resources such as water, food, and raw materials.

With the combination of Accenture Sustainability Services, Avanade’s human-centered digital experience, the Microsoft Cloud, and each company’s robust data and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, the expanded strategic partnership will address both horizontal and industry-specific sustainability challenges to help drive impact and deliver new value, according to the vendors.

“Operating sustainably has become a source of competitive advantage, enabling organizations to increase efficiency, accelerate growth and lead with purpose,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, Microsoft. “By combining our expertise with Accenture and Avanade, we have an opportunity and responsibility to deliver innovative solutions that will empower organizations to achieve their sustainability goals and drive lasting environmental change.”

 Through the expanded strategic partnership, the companies will collaborate to extend existing capabilities and develop new joint offerings across four areas:

• Digital Manufacturing Transition – Manufacturing organizations need to rapidly establish and scale the digital foundation of individual production sites and factory networks. Joint offerings will help improve asset utilization and deploy business models that enable circularity. They will also apply digital twin technology to help reduce emissions, waste, the consumption of materials, water and other resources in production and operations, and improve transparency across the value chain.
• Low Carbon Energy Transition –Joint offerings will help companies in the transition to a net zero economy by connecting and integrating energy infrastructure to develop carbon intelligence, and transform customer offers and business models that can support low carbon energy experiences.
• Sustainable IT with Microsoft Azure and Green Software Engineering – Organizations are seeking energy-efficient infrastructure along with greater workload flexibility and business agility. New solutions on Microsoft Azure span strategy development and assessment of current IT infrastructure; architecting and piloting solutions; a carbon aware approach to migration and green software engineering; and continuous improvement and business transformation with low carbon cloud as its foundation.
• ESG Measurement, Analytics and Performance with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability –Joint solutions will focus on providing sustainability intelligence for value chains by helping to break siloes and provide data-led insights so clients can not only record and report sustainability metrics, but—even more importantly—take action.

“The world is at an inflection point where organizations are expected to play an active role in addressing sustainability issues,” said Pam Maynard, chief executive officer, Avanade. “Now more than ever, technology is key to accelerating environmental, social, and governance goals and enabling organizations to be sustainable through continual change. We’re excited about the opportunity to help leaders leverage the power of people and technology to take practical sustainability actions that make a genuine human impact.”

This expanded strategic partnership builds on Accenture, Microsoft and Avanade’s current joint sustainability efforts, including their pioneering role in the Green Software Foundation, a non-profit that is building a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and practices for green software development.

For more information about this news, visit www.accenture.com, www.microsoft.com, or www.avanade.com.