Recognizing the 2023 Sustainability Award Winners and Finalists

At Oracle, we are committed to solving the world’s most pressing challenges. Tackling climate change is one of the most complex challenges we, and our customers are being faced with. We believe leveraging technology will be the key to ensuring a sustainable future.

Every day, customers are using Oracle products and services to set and realize their own ambitious sustainability goals, all while driving business efficiencies that boost their bottom lines.

That is exemplified by the winners of our 2023 Sustainability Awards. It’s through this global program that we honor customers—companies large and small and from different parts of the world—who have demonstrated excellence in environmental leadership, innovation, cost reduction, and business efficiencies using Oracle Cloud technologies.

Oracle has recognized five organizations (one winner and four finalists) with the 2023 Earthfirst Award for Excellence in Sustainability for incorporating sustainability into their operational strategies. Recipients in this category distinguished themselves by leveraging Oracle Cloud applications to benefit their business and the world around us.

Winner: Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), United States

As the nation’s sixth-largest, community-owned, not-for-profit electric service, SMUD’s been providing safe, reliable and affordable electricity to Sacramento County for over 75 years. SMUD is partnering with Oracle Energy and Water to deliver a customer-centric decarbonization solution that utilizes behavioral science techniques, AI technology, and a patented disaggregation solution to deliver personalized analytics and energy-use insights to its customers. This partnership supports SMUD’s efforts to implement customer programs with ambitious goals to support the decarbonization of buildings and the transportation sector and expand and integrate distributed energy resources. SMUD has a bold 2030 Zero Carbon Plan, which targets eliminating 100% of greenhouse gas emissions from their electric generation by 2030  ̶  the most ambitious carbon reduction goal of any large utility in the United States. SMUD’s 2030 Clean Energy Vision puts the Sacramento Region on the map as an example to follow and invests in more healthy and vibrant communities, a recovered environment and a prosperous economy to improve the lives of all SMUD’s customers and community.

Finalist: Loup Logistics, United States  

Loup Logistics – and its parent company Union Pacific Railroad – has a powerful commitment to sustainability. Loup sought to implement a reliable and centralized solution in Oracle Cloud to streamline operations, consolidate data, and support their commitment to sustainability. By partnering with Oracle, Loup implemented solutions to support their commitment to sustainability and the Oracle solutions have allowed Loup to streamline its logistics operations, a significant part of its climate action plan. Streamlining operations and reducing manual processes will contribute to the company's efforts to reduce its carbon footprint and operate in a more environmentally friendly manner. Inspirage, part of Accenture, played a crucial role in facilitating collaboration during this implementation. The collaborative efforts among the three parties — Loup, Oracle, and Inspirage — led to resolving unique problems and developing tailored solutions aligned with Loup’s sustainability goals.

Finalist: Aida Cruises, Germany

Continuous growth, economic success, and a pioneering spirit in the use of innovative and sustainable technologies – that is what sets AIDA Cruises, as one of the leading tourism companies in Germany. It stands out with its boundless variety of vacation activities on board and at shore, and customized offers for individual vacation desires and travel experiences. Its highest responsibility and top priorities are to operate safely, to protect the environment, and to be in compliance everywhere they operate in the world. 

Aida Cruises wanted to integrate sustainability into their steering model and be able to evaluate Environmenta, Social, and Governce (ESG) impacts and target achievement. With the usage of Oracle Cloud EPM, Aida Cruises improved integration and automation of their sustainability planning processes, increased its ability to adapt models quickly while simulating different scenarios. The results are specifically visible in the optimized shore power intensity, improved proportion of total waste recycled, increased number of school children funded by Aida Cruises, a higher net promoter score, to name a few. 

Aida Cruises is well on its way for emission-neutral cruises by 2050.

Finalist: Link Group, Australia

Link Group's purpose is to connect people with their assets – safely, securely and responsibly. As part of this, they’ve made strong commitments to being a sustainable, diverse and inclusive business. Through their partnership with Oracle HCM, Link Group has not only achieved operational efficiencies that reduce costs and resource consumption, notably paper, they have also demonstrated a robust commitment to diversity and inclusion. Oracle HCM Cloud technology empowers Link Group to access real-time data, enabling them to report on key ESG metrics, including gender diversity and pay parity. Furthermore, it provides an online solution for measuring year-on-year performance for each employee, streamlining the onboarding and off-boarding processes. Link Group’s investment in balancing their business’ impact on people and the planet through technology, makes them a finalist worth recognising and applauding this year.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) was also a finalist in this category.

Oracle also recognized customers (one winner and four finalists) with the 2023 Gaia Award for Excellence in Sustainability for their efforts to spur new forms of environmental progress. These organizations showcased how to keep environmental stewardship in mind by making innovative business decisions using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Winner: Daloop, Portugal

Headquartered in Portugal, Daloop is a startup that is helping to reduce carbon emissions through the decarbonization of mobility since 2010. Daloop is the company behind the pioneering Daloop Platform, an end-to-end operations management platform for eMobility that helps dozens of organisations to reduce emissions and unlock new revenue opportunities with powerful software solutions for EV charging infrastructure, vehicle fleets, and the people that use them.

Daloop’s platform gives businesses the tools they need to scale secure solutions for their users, providing an integrated view of EV charging infrastructure, vehicles and users data. After moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the company took its platform to international markets by providing high performance, security, stability, and scalability. Supported by Oracle’s cloud, at Daloop, we’re changing the way people move – for the better.

Finalist: NIBIO, Norway

Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy research (NIBIO) is one of the largest research institutes in Norway that contributes to food security and safety, sustainable resource management, innovation and value creation through research and knowledge production. The creative minds at NIBIO created SmartForest 4.0 to improve the efficiency of the forest sector by enabling a digital revolution transforming forest information, silviculture, forest operations, wood supply and the overall digital information flow in the sector. The SmartForest platform was built on OCI, utilizing technologies such as Autonomous Database, APEX, Data Science, GPU's (bare metal), Object Storage and more. Especially, they have been able to leverage the combination of Oracle-specific technologies with OpenSource solutions, which has allowed them to move at a rapid pace. They are just getting started on leveraging technology to support the sustainable management of forests. You can learn more of there story on Oracle Newsroom.

 Finalist: SNCF, France

SNCF Group is a leader in passenger transport and freight logistics, in France and around the world. SNCF is pioneering low-carbon mobility and delivering sustainable solutions to the challenges of moving passengers and freight. They have set lofty goals such as by 2025, prioritizing renewable energy sources to power trains and eliminate diesel usage by 2035. By Migrating their previous on-premise ERP to Oracle Exadata cloud Service they have seen a rationalization of resources as well as reduced electricity usage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Finalist: Martin Brower, United States

Martin Brower is a leading supply chain solutions provider for the world’s top brands. They strive to provide world-class supply chain and logistics services that don’t just reduce their footprint – but deliver environmental benefits throughout the value chain. They have been on an ambitious decades-long journey to pioneer solutions that deliver a net zero future by 2050 for them and their customers. To meet this target, Martin Brower will halve their absolute operational emissions by 2030. Reaching these targets require changes across their entire business, including reducing or eliminating their on-premise data centers in an effort to reduce costs associated with owning and managing the infrastructure as well as reducing or eliminating the associated carbon footprint. Moving to Oracle Cloud has resulted in an increase in performance and resilience for Martin Brower while reducing complexities associated with owning and operating global data centers. This has also reduced their carbon footprint, as we at Oracle have invested in energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions for our data centers. This is just the beginning as Martin Brower continues to take action to deliver net zero and circular solutions for their company, customers, and the supply chain industry. We at Oracle are honored to partner with them and acknowledge their achievements thus far.

Finalist: Punch Torino, Italy

PUNCH Torino is specialized in the design and development of innovative propulsion systems. Founded in 2005 by GM with the name of General Motors Powertrain Europe, in February 2020 it became part of the PUNCH Group – a leading supplier for the development, integration and manufacturing of driveline and powertrain solutions. In May 2021, PUNCH Torino founded the new company PUNCH Hydrocells dedicated to the development of hydrogen-powered solutions. In January 2022, the spin-off of PUNCH Torino’s Software and Controls division gave birth to the new company PUNCH Softronix. After thoroughly reviewing multiple cloud vendors in a comprehensive proof of concept, PUNCH Torino selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as the foundation for conducting multiple simulation and virtual prototyping services. OCI has also enabled PUNCH Torino to support high-performance requirements and optimize costs.

Congratulations to the winners and finalists from this year and thank you to all who submitted nominations! All of us at Oracle are encouraged by the results that the 2023 Sustainability Award winners have exhibited. These organizations, along with so many others, are pioneering methods of applying cloud technologies to benefit our planet, not only because it’s good for the environment but also because it’s good for business. We are more committed than ever to supplying such innovators with the advanced tools and close partnerships they need to continue blazing a trail to a more sustainable future.