SAP to Purchase Clear Standards, Pursue Green IT

SAP announced on May 11 that it intends for an undisclosed sum to purchase Clear Standards, a company that designs applications for measuring greenhouse gas emissions. If everything goes according to plan, the acquisition will be completed in June 2009.

The applications designed by Clear Standards fit into a current trend, followed by a number of other IT companies in the space, of producing programs that both measure and help mitigate an organization's carbon footprint.

The purchase "will accelerate our vision [of] deliver[ing] a complete set of solutions to enable end-to-end sustainable business," Leo Apotheker, co-CEO of SAP, said in a statement.

According to SAP, Clear Standards "helps organizations accurately measure, optimize and report greenhouse gas ... emissions and other environmental impacts across internal operations." Its programs are delivered via a Web-based on-demand delivery model, which SAP plans to integrate so as to tap into the data stored by SAP Business Suite 7 and the SAP Environment, Health and Safety Management application.

In addition to GHG emissions, Clear Standards software also measures and reports on the environmental impact of companies' waste and water consumption.

Despite the global recession, SAP has been busily rolling out a number of enterprise-oriented programs, including SAP Business Suite 7, generally available to worldwide customers as of May 5.

SAP Business Suite 7 features a modular software library with SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supplier Relationship Management, and SAP Supply Chain Management. The new capabilities allow customers to deploy certain modules without necessarily needing to upgrade the entire platform, an option that appeals to businesses' desire to save money.

The Suite also includes 2,800 enterprise services and a built-in solution manager that allows administrators to implement content changes to its applications.

Other companies have moved into the green IT space in an aggressive way. In February 2009, Microsoft released the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics AX, which allows executives and IT administrators to reduce their companies' carbon footprint and energy costs via a user-friendly dashboard.