Accenture, Microsoft and their digital, cloud and advisory services and solutions joint venture Avanade announced today the launch of a new partnership aimed at delivering solutions enabling organizations to address their key sustainability challenges.

The partnership will initially focus on helping organizations transform operations, products, services and value chains to accelerate the net zero transition, with plans to expand focus in the future to tackle other ESG issues. The companies stated that they are investing in the co-development of solutions, designed from the start to emit less carbon over their lifecycle, and offering advisory services helping businesses to reduce emissions, transition to new energy sources, and reduce or eliminate waste.

Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Accenture, said:

“Our partnership with Microsoft and Avanade will help organizations find new value at the intersection of technology and sustainability – from embracing green software development principles and sustainable cloud migrations, to digital twin technology adoption – to drive stronger performance and competitiveness, and make progress on their decarbonization goals and their journey to net zero.”

The partnership comes as Microsoft and Accenture have each recently signaled an increased focus on providing sustainability-related services to enterprises. Microsoft recently launched its cloud-based sustainability suite, Cloud for Sustainability, and Accenture has made a series of ESG-focused acquisitions over the past few months for its Accenture Sustainability Services unit. The companies also collaborated on the launch of the Green Software Foundation.

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, said:

“Operating sustainably has become a source of competitive advantage, enabling organizations to increase efficiency, accelerate growth, and lead with purpose. By combining our expertise with Accenture and Avanade, we have an opportunity and responsibility to deliver innovative solutions that will empower organizations to achieve their sustainability goals and drive lasting environmental change.”

The new collaboration will focus on developing offerings in key areas including solutions to help manufacturing organizations to improve asset utilization and enable circularity, offerings to enable organizations to transform operations and services across the energy value chain, and sustainable IT infrastructure and green-software engineering solutions. The partnership will also focus on developing joint solutions for ESG measurement, analytics and performance across value chains with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Pam Maynard, Chief Executive Officer at Avanade, said:

“Now more than ever, technology is key to accelerating environmental, social and governance goals and enabling organizations to be sustainable through continual change.”