My colleague Laura Casasanto at Project Expert has a news brief up about SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand 5.0, SAP's latest offering of the product that helps monitor and report on energy use.

SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand 5.0 promises to report, analyze, and reduce energy and greenhouse gas emissions cost-effectively. It assists in environmental regulations and reporting requirements adherence. The new version allows a company to share information surrounding energy and carbon consumption with all organizational levels. Language support for more than 50 countries and employee incentive programs aim to engage the workforce in their company’s sustainability goal.

SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand is SAP’s first application created to run natively in the cloud, allowing companies to reduce operational costs and begin running it quickly. According to SAP, the application is extensible at any time and scaling costs are flexible. Autodesk, Fisker Automotive, and Arch Chemicals have already implemented the application.

It's an interesting offering in that it seems to accomplish two major SAP initiatives at once: pushing the business and societal gains that can be achieved by sustainable practices, and taking advantage of cloud computing.

It will be interesting to monitor the progress of this product, and really of sustainability in general. With credit still tight, companies are still only dabbling in some of the latest and greatest sustainability offerings, so if this i s successful, it could represent an important new area in SAP's business, while also reflecting how cloud computing alters enterprises' use of SAP systems.