BI Solutions for Sustainability Exist-But Can You Find Them?

I’m very pleased to see another business intelligence software company has added an offering for corporate sustainability reporting. On December 15, 2009, SAP/Business Objects announced their comprehensive sustainability solution, joining both Actuate and SAS.

Corporate sustainability is increasingly becoming an integral function of the business and reporting plays a key role.

“Sustainability is increasingly mission-critical across the corporate world,” Stephen Stokes, vice president of Sustainability and Green Technologies at AMR Research, said in a statement. “Managing and reporting an organization’s sustainable performance via transparent and high quality data collation, analysis, optimization and modeling is a new basis for defining and communicating operational excellence.”

Businesses are looking to their business intelligence providers for reporting solutions they can integrate into their current BI environment – solutions that will help get them up and running quickly.

That thought led me to wonder how easy it is to find reporting solutions for sustainability. I first did a Google search for “corporate sustainability reporting solution.” The good news is SAP made it to the first page. SAS made it to the second page, and I was five pages deep and never found Actuate.

Interesting, what I did find was Oracle talks about sustainability but doesn’t have a dedicated solution.

Next, I went to the SAP, SAS, and Actuate websites. I wanted to know how difficult it would be to find their sustainability solutions. With SAP just releasing their news two weeks ago, you would have thought it would still be front and center. Intuitively, I thought I would find it in their Business Objects section, but no luck. Finally did a search and found it in their SAP solutions section. However, I tried going straight to the solution section (without using search results) and could find not it.

So I tried SAS. They were a little better. Nothing on the home page under “solutions” but hit the “more products & solutions” link and you’ll find their offering.

Lastly, took a look at Actuate. Nothing mentioned on the home page about sustainability solutions. Nothing in the navigational menus. Making it more difficult, they organize by product and don’t have a menu for solutions. Finally resorted to doing a search. Actuate’s sustainability solution came up easily.

All of this shows that business intelligence solution providers are making good progress in addressing the demand for sustainability reporting, but they are still falling down in helping prospects and customers find their solutions.