Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonkTV. My guest on the show today is Peter Graff. Peter Graff is SAP's newly appointed Chief Sustainability Officer. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. Peter, SAP came out with a big announcement last week around sustainability. Part of the announcement was the installing of yourself as the new position of Chief Sustainability Officer of SAP. Another announcement was around your targets to reduce carbon for SAP. And the third announcement, or the third part of the announcement, was around your enabling your customers to reduce their carbon footprint with the rollout of your environmental health and safety dashboard. Can you talk to us a little bit about the position of CSO? Why was that? Why do SAP feel there's a need for a CSO position? And a bit around the structure of the position. All right. Well, first of all, I'd like to start by making sure people understand why is that at all significant? Has SAP just discovered sustainability last week and now they're making an announcement about that? And everyone who's followed SAP in the past know that we don't start from scratch. We have some great visibility in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, for example, where we lead the software category. We also have products out. So this is not completely new. What's new from the announcement last week is that SAP made a strategic commitment towards sustainability and embedded it into the core of its business strategy. So it's got great support all the way in the top of the organization with the CEO, but it's also part of our strategic business plan and it trickles down into all arms of the organization. Sure. And Leo, the CEO, talked about sustainability at the CBIT conference last week as well, didn't he? That's correct, yes. And we think that, in a nutshell, IT has a lot to learn, but also we see a fantastic potential for IT to tackle some of the big issues that we're facing. And that goes beyond what commonly is referred to as green IT, which is when IT people do the right thing,
2:07which is clean their own house first and try to improve the energy efficiency of the data center. What we believe is this is an important part and we're participating in this one, but also we're looking at the other 98% of, let's say, carbon emissions that are happening outside the data center and we can tackle that. So it's a strategic commitment to sustainability. My position in the business is to achieve two things. Number one, to drive internal targets, mostly around carbon, because we don't have a big production in terms of plants. We don't consume a lot of water or land or other natural resources. So carbon really is the one challenge for us that we can tackle. On the other hand, we want to drive new products to market that really helped businesses around the world address the issue. And I'd like to put the two a little bit into contrast. If you look at carbon, our footprint is about half a million tons of carbon a year. The combined footprint of all of our customers is 10,000 times bigger than that. It's five gigatons. And that is, we understand, yes, at SAP, we have to do the right thing ourselves and we need to walk the talk. But there's a tremendous opportunity for us to help large and small organizations around the world as we automate their business processes. And that's the duality of my job. And that's why I'm really excited about that. Okay. And your position as CSO, do you have budget? Do you have people answering to you? Is your job a job with teeth or is it, you know, a marketing exercise? I hope to believe it has teeth. The reason why is the way how we're setting it up. We had a couple of choices and we decided to set it up as a matrix. That means the developers that are working on sustainability solutions stay in development, the marketeers stay in marketing, the salespeople stay in sales and so forth. However, the leaders of all these groups have a dual reporting line into the function of the business as well as into me as the sustainability
4:11officer. We're driving the behavior through KPIs, through internal awareness campaigns and a lot of other things that are interesting to dive in. I do not think it's a job without teeth also because the awareness internally at SAP around these issues is huge. It's an issue that touches not only the minds of people but also the hearts. It's been very easy to recruit people into the effort. And that's also something that makes me very confident we're going to achieve our targets, both the ones internal as well as the ones where we're trying to help customers with new products. Super. Peter, thanks a million for coming on the show. Thank you.