'Sustainability will be a killer app for our salespeople' - NTT Ltd on Sustainability as a Service launch

NTT senior VP Devin Yaung sets out hopes for new 'end-to-end' net zero offering

Sustainability is the "killer app" NTT Ltd sales staff have been waiting for to help them shift private 5G.

That's according to the executive spearheading the IT infrastructure giant's new ‘Sustainability as a Service' offering.

Drawing on $10bn-revenue NTT Ltd's IoT, private 5G, edge compute, smart solutions, digital twin and machine learning technology, alongside sister brand NTT Data's consulting services, the offering is designed to help clients reach their net zero goals.

Talking to CRN, Devin Yaung, NTT Ltd group senior vice president of Enterprise IoT, said sustainability has become "the number one or two thing" customers ask for. He pointed to recent Gartner research predicting that the proportion of companies reporting their carbon will rise from three per cent in 2020 to 46 per cent by 2025.

"[Sustainability as a Service] will move things like our private 5G by providing a use case," Yaung predicted.

"If I put in a private network, or I put in private 5G - there's no killer app... yet. We believe sustainability is going to be a key theme that our salespeople can have that conversation with our clients."

Buying sustainability outcomes

The push for net zero "will create new opportunities for technology and service providers", Gartner said recently. It identified cloud sustainability, carbon footprint measurement and advanced grid management software as three hotspots.

NTT Ltd is billing its new offering as "the industry's first full-stack Sustainability as a Service".

Although it will offer the components of it a la carte, clients who invest in the full "end to end" Sustainability as a Service offering will be buying "an outcome". This could be predictive maintenance of a fleet of devices, leak alerts on 100 pipes, temperature sensing for multiple locations or building management system integration, Yaung explained.

"That's what sustainability as a service is," he said, adding that NTT Ltd will initially target clients in the healthcare and manufacturing sectors.

NTT Ltd is looking at teaming with three of the Big Four auditors, Yaung added.

There are a lot of clients whose CEO has committed to these [net zero] targets - just like NTT did - and all the people underneath are like ‘oh, wow!, how am I going to report and do this'?

"They do a lot of ESG audits, and they also have tax capability to look at what carbon credits for green energy and investments are there. We're asking ‘how do we integrate our infrastructure capabilities with your platform?'. They're doing a lot of the carbon calculations, and the main thing they're telling me is that they have a lot of clients whose CEO has committed to these [net zero] targets - just like NTT did - and all the people underneath are like ‘oh, wow!, how am I going to report and do this'? [The auditors] can help aggregate all this information to really help us be differentiated."

IT services giant Atos recently began offering to pay clients a financial penalty (via carbon credits) in the event it fails to achieve targets set out in a "decarbonisation level agreement".

When asked whether this concept could gain traction in the sustainability arena, Yaung said it already is at NTT Ltd albeit in a more limited form.

"We're creating a container tracking solution that monitors the conditions of the container, and then Munich will underwrite this," he said.

"So you're seeing solutions being underwritten by insurance companies. You're also seeing a lot of outcome-based arrangements where if we don't provide something you will get your money back. This revenue sharing is going to be increasing because a lot of this [around carbon reduction] is new for a lot of people."