EY And IBM Enhance Partnership To Expand Sustainability Offerings

EY And IBM Enhance Partnership To Expand Sustainability Offerings

On March 2^nd 2023, EY and IBM announced a global collaboration to improve customers’ sustainability by focusing on strategy development, data management, and linking sustainability and financial performance. This announcement builds on EY and IBM’s existing partnership, leveraging EY’s advisory services for sustainability strategies and business transformation and IBM’s suite of digital software and technology capabilities.

Their planned offerings reflect increasing customer demands for integrated solutions that will allow corporations to manage large data sets and use the information to improve sustainability performance. Specifically, EY and IBM will collaborate to provide:

• Scope 3 GHG emissions accounting and management, leveraging IBM’s carbon management software capability (see Verdantix Green Quadrant: Enterprise Carbon Management Software 2022)
• Financed emissions for financial institutions
• ESG Managed Services
• EY’s Sustainable Enterprise Asset Management (SEAM) tool, which helps customers in asset-heavy industries to decarbonize their operations

The partnership’s focus on Scope 3 emissions echoes the need for firms to better understand emissions throughout the value chain if they are to accelerate their decarbonization (see Verdantix Strategic Focus: Carbon Management Innovation Takes Aim At Scope 3 Emissions Challenges).

Collaborations like this are evidence of an ongoing trend of service firms partnering with software providers to scale sustainability services and help customers navigate the fast-changing ESG regulatory landscape. In the past two months alone, several other service providers have announced partnerships with software firms: ERM and Salesforce have announced a collaboration focused on decarbonization solutions and services, KPMG and Workiva are partnering to provide ESG data and reporting solutions, and Bain & Company and Schneider Electric have joined forces to support corporate energy management and decarbonization efforts.

However, EY and IBM’s partnership is something of an outlier in its specific focus on the interrelation between maintenance and sustainability. Sustainability has only become a consistent feature within enterprise asset management (EAM) software vendor strategies in the past three years, and only in a limited capacity. Usually, integrating sustainability into EAM only occurs through light integrations between separate EAM and energy management solutions. For example, Accruent, Brightly Software and Ultimo all offer both EAM and energy management tools.

For more details on how partnerships between service providers and software vendors will expand as corporate data management requirements continue to grow, see Verdantix Strategic Focus: Open Ecosystem For Consulting Partnerships. To read further about how EAM software suppliers are integrating sustainability within product portfolios, see Verdantix Green Quadrant: Enterprise Asset Management Software 2022, and for more information on EY’s sustainability offerings, see Verdantix Green Quadrant: ESG & Sustainability Consulting 2022.