Sustainability Now Critical to CIOs – and They’re Looking to MSPs for Help

If you still think sustainability isn’t a key consideration when choosing an IT supplier, think again. Nearly half of CIOs consider carbon output energy efficiency when selecting new suppliers. Furthermore, 20% factor in sustainability when choosing managed service providers (MSPs).

Giving its growing importance to the C-suite, sustainability in IT was the topic of the 2023 Logicalis CIO Summit on Thursday.

“If you told me a few years ago that sustainability would be the headline topic for a CIO-level technology event, I would have been skeptical to say the least. But today, business and technology leaders are urgently exploring all their options to reduce their emissions across scope to one, two and three,” said Logicalis CEO, Bob Bailkoski.

Outperforming Competitors with ESG

CEO Bob Bailkoski hosted the Logicalis CIO Summit.

The statistics come from Logicalis’ CIO report. The research found the underlying drivers for improving sustainability practices were largely commercial. They include market competition, customer attraction, employee expectations and customer retention.

“In other words, sustainable business outcomes have become the norm,” said Bailkoski.

Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research lead, IDC (shown above, delivering his comments during the CIO Summit) agreed that sustainability has moved from a “niche, silo topic” to the top of most business agendas.

“Organizations that focus on material ESG [environmental, social, and governance] issues and manage them well outperform their competitors financially,” he said.

More than 80% of decision-makers consider ESG factors to be very important to the enterprise value of the organization. That number is up from 50% just a couple of years ago, said Stengel.

IDC’s Bjoern Stengel said sustainability is at the top of most business agendas.

“Organizations are moving away from looking at sustainability management only as a risk mitigation approach. They’re making deliberate decisions to buy technology that helps them drive business value and ESG performance rather than just respond to stakeholder pressure or to remain compliant.”

Organizations Look to Managed Services

Moreover, Stengel said, many organizations are relying on MSPs to help them on their sustainability journey. The Logicalis CIO report highlighted how 48% of CIOs said progress in sustainability is hindered by a lack of in-house skills.

“By 2025, 40% of ESG services engagements will require a managed services component to better address the long-term nature and intense data needs of sustainable transformation.”

The analyst said CIOs need to assess their IT vendors on their enabling capabilities. Also, they should “team up with the right partners that can accelerate your maturity journey, whether that’s key infrastructure vendors, software firms, services firms or other partners.”

Recent Canalys research claimed that EMEA channel partners continue to lead the charge on sustainability. APAC partners have also been demonstrating an increasing commitment. However, “most partners in the Americas remain many years behind. They need to catch up in terms of dedicating resources and tracking vital sustainability [key performance indicators].”