By Patricia Okumu

At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Las Vegas, Nevada, Dimension Data’s parent company NTT Ltd. unveiled its full-stack Net-Zero Action product.

The solution, which combines NTT’s Private 5G, Edge Compute, and IoT technologies, will make use of NTT’s extensive infrastructure and services capabilities to assist clients in minimizing the environmental effect of business activities.. As firms try to expand sustainability efforts that will help them reach net-zero targets and make data-driven decisions to minimize their carbon footprint, climate initiatives are top of mind.

Through improved climate action, such as measuring, monitoring, and reporting impact, proactively working to reduce climate events, and increasing reaction times when identifying difficulties, this ground-breaking product will assist clients in achieving greater economic performance.

“We are very excited to launch the industry’s first full-stack Sustainability as a Service offering at a time when industries are looking for effective ways to make good on their commitments to achieving net-zero goals,” said Devin Yaung, Group Senior Vice President of Enterprise IoT Products and Services at NTT Ltd. “Today’s news reinforces NTT’s commitment to helping organizations proactively limit climate incidents, respond in real-time with automated resolutions, and accurately measure their environmental impact in communications with regulators, employees and other stakeholders.” 

 Organizations are increasingly being held accountable for achieving net-zero goals to meet the expectations of their stakeholders, including clients, shareholders, institutional investors, employees, business partners, and communities. In a recent survey, 58% of Fortune 500 companies aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve net-zero goals by 2050 or sooner. Those that commit to these goals are often faced with the additional challenges of being under-resourced and underfunded or are unable to consistently capture accurate data fit for purpose. Additionally, McKinsey has estimated that it will take $9.2 trillion of aggregated annual capital expense to achieve 2050 goals. 

In response to this challenge, NTT has announced the industry’s first full-stack Sustainability as a Service architecture combining extensible technologies leveraging NTT’s solution building blocks including IoT, Private 5G, Edge Compute, NTT Smart Solutions Platform, Digital Twins and Machine Learning products. The full-stack offering along with its consulting service is designed to be customized depending on net-zero goals, the organization and the supply chain’s carbon-producing footprint. It will help organizations build a comprehensive picture of the status of climate goals by streamlining the monitoring, measurement, and reporting of emissions. It will also speed up incident response times to get to the root cause of an issue. All of this is applicable to industries such as manufacturing, transportation and logistics, and healthcare providers. 

“Together NTT and Dimension Data believe in contributing to society through our business operations by applying technology for good. Dimension Data MEA will be engaging with clients across the region to ensure that the solution offering is tailored to assist customers reach their carbon footprint reduction benchmarks,” says Lauren Wortmann, Principal Head: Applications Dimension Data MEA.  

The full-stack sustainability offering includes:

• Remote Environmental Monitoring: Using NTT’s IoT for sustainability solution, this technology uses sensors to identify the presence of pollutants in the air, water, and plants across the globe, in real-time. In manufacturing, this can assist with measuring processes and products that consume energy. In the transportation industry, this can monitor greenhouse gas emissions more effectively for fleet management.
• Digital Twin and Smart Solution: This solution uses a combination of NTT Smart Solutions and Digital Twin capabilities which act as the “brain” of the system. This will help organizations to predict issues with the built-in Machine Learning technology, respond to incidents faster with context from Digital Twin and measure the carbon footprint at a granular, actionable level, in real-time.
• Automation and Orchestration: Leveraging the existing A&O, the Digital Twin automates problem resolution where possible or creates a ticket for support personnel to investigate and address the issue and thus limit greenhouse impact.

“As a global leader in tire and rubber manufacturing, we believe that growth, innovation and sustainability go hand in hand,” said Nizar Trigui, chief technology officer and group president, Bridgestone America. “Having real-time visibility into our carbon footprint and progressing towards our net-zero ambitions is an essential foundation of our growth and innovation agenda.”