As the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) landscape continues to shift and change, its importance to company stakeholders, consumers, and investment researchers has only continued to grow. Major developments are being made within the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) industry by rapid innovations among hyperscalers in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. These developments are leading many industry experts to question the various ESG concerns surrounding them within the information technology (IT) sector.
AlphaSense boasts an extensive range of expert insights from industry experts who discuss ESG trends and topics within its expert transcript library. Leadership across all industries consider ESG investing to be an important facet to their business approach. Expert Insights on ESG can enable investors to use these criterias to evaluate companies and map out investment strategies.
Below we explore key Expert Insights on ESG trends within the TMT sector that can be easily found in the AlphaSense expert transcript library from governance adoption of AI, power consumption in cybersecurity, and sustainability for hyperscalers.
Key ESG Themes Found in the Expert Transcript Library
Through the lens of expert perspectives, the AlphaSense expert transcript library provides a concise exploration of how ESG principles are shaping the trajectory of responsible business practices within the ever-evolving IT landscape.
We explore these various concerns in greater detail below:
Governance Adoption of AI
Governance encompasses a wide range of practices and principles that guide not only how a company is managed, but also how it interacts with its stakeholders (i.e., shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and the broader community). The rise of generative AI has further driven the importance of governance in the realm of IT.
Despite companies grappling with the ethical implications of genAI, it is still difficult to see how it will pan out in regards to ESG. A former senior manager at Reltio, responsible for supporting relationships and strategizing market expansion, believes that it is still too early to see the impacts of AI on the governance space in terms of adoption.
“Yeah, I’d say still a little bit early. I think we’re very much at the peak now of having the terminology around cloud and digital transformation attached to it because even going back to the mid-2000s, so early 2010, 2011, 2012, where existing vendors like Informatica were just at the very beginning of adopting cloud and then there’s a lot of new players that are coming into the market on the cloud-native angle.
I think we’re very much at the explosion really of companies that are beginning to actually follow the lead of others and be cloud-centric with how they manage data across the organization. I think the next version will probably be introducing AI and things like that more commonly. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but probably not that far off. In terms of the valuations of the companies that are coming in from a cloud-native angle, some of them are exploiting. If you take Microsoft, they have a new player in the market called CluedIn, which I’m not sure if you’ve heard of.”
– Former Senior Manager, Reltio | Expert Transcript
The expert also suggested that many companies are migrating away from on-premise data governance.
”Yeah. If we take a step back to on-premise, which is where a lot of these large entities are working from and coming from and migrating away from at the moment, typically, over the last couple of decades, a lot of businesses have had data warehouses through the likes of IBM, SAP, Oracle, those sorts of organizations. They have tried to achieve understanding data and having a single source of truth through either bespoke custom solutions that IT have built and loading data from source systems into data warehouses to then try and make meaningful decisions from that.
Typically, a lot of it was MDM and data governance on-premise. That came with lots of challenges that existed around only offering one source of truth and not having full replication across source systems and feeding that data back to marketing and customer service and business operations and that sort of thing.”
– Former Senior Manager, Reltio | Expert Transcript
Power Consumption in Cybersecurity
Another key trend shaping the future of the IT sector is the challenges in reducing power consumption of data centers. As AI technology and cybersecurity rapidly evolve, so does the reliance on data centers which leaves potential market opportunities for power consumption and sustainability solutions for data centers.
The expert, who was previously Vice President of Sales for at Tech Data, stated that:
”If you look at the two other big things that I think are happening in the world, one is the whole data center area of the market, the power consumption is one of the biggest challenges in that space. Anybody who can come up with solutions around more efficient power consumption in the data center, I think would have some interesting market opportunities.”
– Former Vice President of Sales, Tech Data | Expert Transcript
The expert also noted that they did not include cloud computing as a top growth area but it should not be discounted as it will be a part of many sustainability solutions. As Microsoft, Google, and Amazon continue to build AI into their search engines and products, cloud computing will be heavily included.
“As far as AI goes, I don’t know if you saw recently but Microsoft made some big announcements about how they’re building AI into their search engine and some of their other products. I think that you’ll see them in Google and probably Amazon making some plays for that part of the market as well.
All three of those, by the way, are heavily engaged in cloud. I did not include cloud in my top growth area. It’s a highly fragmented space that has on-premise cloud, public cloud, and then hybrid scenarios. Depending upon the solution that’s being delivered, cloud will be a part of many of the security or AI or data center and sustainability solutions. You can’t discount it. It’s going to be a part of the platform no matter what.”
– Former Vice President of Sales, Tech Data | Expert Transcript
Sustainability for Hyperscalers
Currently, a majority of companies, countries, and world organizations are heavily focused on making a significant impact in sustainability. There is significant growth to be seen in the improvements and material impact of the sustainability of many products as the expert from Tech Data suggested:
“As a really big picture, it’s not necessarily a technology but it’s highly related to the whole IT sector is sustainability. Most companies and countries and world organizations are really focused on how to make a real difference in sustainability. If any of the products that you’re focused on can provide improvements or material impact to sustainability, I think that that’s another area that has some significant growth.”
– Former Vice President of Sales, Tech Data | Expert Transcript
The expert also suggested that IBM, Cisco, and HP are likely best positioned to take a leadership role in sustainability:
“When you look at sustainability, I think the really big companies like IBM and Cisco and HP will probably take a leadership role there because the foundational IT products that they sell have a huge impact on any sustainability program that a company would try to or want to meet specific objectives in.
IBM, Cisco, and HP Apple, I would put in this category. They are, as a corporate entity, committed to sustainability as a part of their core values. That will continue to impact the kinds of products and services that they bring to the marketplace. I think they’ll lead the way in the overall sustainability part of the market.”
– Former Vice President of Sales, Tech Data | Expert Transcript
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Ees is a Content Marketing Specialist at AlphaSense and responsible for elevating the brand of Expert Insights, a unique content set of alternative data, through the power of storytelling. Previously, Ees has been a seasoned copywriter across various industries throughout his career and also authored “masala chai,” an illustrated poetry book capturing his journey as a South Asian minority in America.
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