As I return home from OpenText World Europe, I am feeling invigorated by the powerful conversations that occurred throughout the week. I am also feeling inspired by the incredible sights and experiences that come with traveling this beautiful world of ours and am once again reminded of the critical role we play in protecting it.
I read Before It’s Gone by Jonathan Vigliotti while traveling, and it is a story for every small town facing climate change—from fire, water, air, food, and earth.
Today, April 22, is Earth Day, an opportunity to not only celebrate just how extraordinary our world is but reflect on the action we must all take to ensure a healthier planet, and a brighter future. Something that we remain deeply committed to as an organization.
At OpenText, we believe that it is essential to understand the urgent environmental challenges and create a future that is sustainable and inclusive. Through the OpenText Zero-In Initiative, we have a Zero Footprint focus, working diligently to achieve our sustainability goals as a company, while helping our customers to do the same.
Essentially, how do you achieve maximum impact with the lightest touch to the environment?
At OpenText World Europe, I spoke extensively about the power of AI, the importance of adopting an AI mindset, and the new AI-powered innovations that we are proud to offer our customers. As I reflect today on Earth Day, I whole-heartedly believe that the revolutionary potential of AI can not only help us to accelerate our Zero-In program but can ultimately help reshape our world into a more sustainable one.
What we are building at OpenText impacts humanity and impacts the world. We believe that our products help to address environmental and societal challenges by bringing forth technologies that enable visibility and action. From the basics of digitization to what we can do with observability to anticipate the regulations to come, OpenText innovates with our customers’ sustainability needs in mind. We remain steadfast in our commitment to offering innovative climate solutions to help our customers unleash exponential innovation—through information, automation, and the cloud.
We are also partnering with our cloud partners to gain more energy efficiency and to seek more hydro- and wind-powered infrastructure.
The below illustrates some of the key sustainability wins stemming from OpenText products last year. I look forward to sharing more results like these in our upcoming Corporate Citizenship Report, which will be released in August.
By investing in innovative technologies that contribute to a net-zero future, we can help our customers move from pledge to progress. Companies like Method, Heineken, Sutter Health, and so many more are already reducing their footprint thanks to OpenText solutions—and their success is just the beginning as we continue to add new innovations to our portfolio.
Here are a few more of the products that are helping customers address environmental challenges while improving efficiency:
- Our Cloud FinOps solution offers reporting for scope 2 and 3 emissions produced by both a customer’s cloud and owned data centers. This is the first step of our GreenOps solution to help customers reduce their IT carbon footprint.
- OpenText Active Risk Monitor gives customers visibility into their supply chains, including a view into their suppliers’ ESG compliance details, which can support a shift towards more sustainable, ethical business practices.
- OpenText Content Cloud and OpenText Experience Cloud help customers digitize documents at scale and run their businesses on a paperless infrastructure
- OpenText Vertica runs on less hardware due to the optimization of products and data compression, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint.
- With OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, each customer receives its own segregated tenant on a multi-tenant cloud platform, rather than running cycles on their own dedicated servers, resulting in less energy usage.
- OpenText UFT Digital Lab allows developers to simulate in a software environment versus physical devices, which means less infrastructure, less power consumption, and ultimately, a smaller carbon footprint.
Our Path to Zero
As we continue our zero-in journey, it’s important that we recognize that the path to zero requires collective action—we all have an important role to play in understanding how our daily choices can have a lasting impact.
The great news is that OpenTexters are already doing tremendous work in helping us to zero in on our zero footprint goals, and I am pleased to share today that OpenText has recently been recognized as one of Canada’s Greenest Employers for the very first time. This achievement is a direct testament to the passion and dedication of our employees and comes on the heels of several impressive ESG-related accolades, including qualifying as a constituent on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and receiving a “AAA” rating from MSCI.
To quote Bertrand Piccard during last week’s opening keynote: “The impossible does not exist in the reality, it exists only in the mindset of the people that believe that the future is going to be an extrapolation of the past—which, of course, is never the case. The future is unpredictable, uncertain, and it requires us to be creative, to be innovative, and to be pioneers.”
We need to keep challenging ourselves:
- How do we achieve maximum impact with the lightest touch to the environment?
- How can we build key and essential features for our customers to achieve the Path to Zero?
- And lastly, how can we lead as individuals, and take personal action for a healthier planet?
It is not what we leave behind, it is what we send forward. Happy Earth Day.
