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Top 5 Things You Shouldn’t Miss From HPE Living Progress in 2017

Inspiring Progress From climate activism to product innovation, a look back at some of the highlights from HPE's Living Progress over the past year.

Published 6 years ago | About a 5 minute read

Inspiring Progress

From climate activism to product innovation, a look back at some of the highlights from HPE's Living Progress over the past year.

We were recognized as a leader in corporate climate action

This year corporations took the helm of global climate action in the face of global political uncertainty. HPE was among the first companies to join Low-Carbon USA, advocating for the Paris climate accord by making a public appeal to the Trump Administration alongside customers like Adobe, Intel, and Microsoft. Within days of the decision to withdraw the U.S. from the accord, HPE joined hundreds of businesses, contributing $6.2 trillion to the US economy, to reaffirm our commitment to transitioning to a low-carbon economy.

Our commitment to climate action and sustainability leadership earned HPE recognition as one of the world’s most sustainable companies through prestigious global rankings including the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, CDP Climate ‘A List’ and Supplier Engagement ‘A List’, and an EcoVadis Gold rating. These sustainability benchmarks have become a key reference point in sustainable investing for investors and companies alike.

We became the first IT company to set science-based emissions targets across our value chain

Reducing our climate impact is not only the right thing to do for the planet, it’s simply good business. It helps our business run smarter, at less cost, and attracts the favor of customers, investors, and employees. In the midst of the Paris decision, we proudly launched the industry’s first science-based emissions reduction program for our supply chain. This new goal completed HPE’s suite of science-based targets, becoming the first IT company to set targets across the value chain that align with the goals of the Paris accord and what climate science says is necessary to prevent dangerous climate change. As part of our new goal, we will build our suppliers’ capabilities and improve industry standards and practices.

We built game changing products that raised the bar for IT efficiency

Beyond our own operations, we’re helping our customers reduce their climate impact by innovating sustainable IT products that are faster and more energy-efficient than ever before. In June, the HPE SGI 8600 system, deployed at Tokyo Institute of Technology, was ranked the #1 system on the Green500 list, which rates the top 500 supercomputers in the world by energy efficiency. HPE also introduced the world’s largest single-memory computer, enabling quantum leaps in efficiency and computing capabilities, and sophisticated enough to send a spacecraft to Mars.

The introduction of HPE Pointnext will also help HPE deliver efficient IT solutions to customers through new advisory and transformation services, ongoing operational efficiency tools that optimize workloads and resources, and consumption-based IT solutions with the ability to bring overprovisioning from 50% down to 10%.

We utilized HPE technology and innovation to tackle global challenges

Last year, HPE launched the Living Progress Challenge, asking the global community: what digital tools and software applications would you create to improve people’s lives? Our goal: improve the lives of 1 million people by 2020. Through the Challenge, we brought HPE expertise and technology to individuals and NGO experts in the field in order to address pressing global challenges. And this year, we launched these first solutions to market – including an app helping rural women gain access to financial tools through the international non-profit Pact, and a web-based tool seeking to combat illegal trade with WWF.

The Living Progress Challenge was awarded the Global Grand Prize for Innovation at the ISPIM Innovation Conference in Vienna, selected by 14 judges and a voting audience of 400 peers to beat out Fraunhofer, GE, and IBM for its unique approach to crowdsourcing and design-thinking.

We played our part in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals

The UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals aim to unite countries, organizations, and individuals in a combined effort to tackle global issues like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change. This year, we mapped the Goals, and their supporting targets, against our Living Progress strategy to determine where our efforts will have the biggest contribution to sustainable development and where we can best leverage our unique capacity as a global IT company.

We are targeting our implementation and actions to advance four key goals:

Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy
Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Goal 13: Climate Action

As we look forward to 2018 we will continue to raise the bar for ourselves and our industry by setting ambitious targets and working with our stakeholders to drive accountability. By applying Living Progress to our every action, we can create value for our company by contributing to sales, enabling cost savings, and enhancing our reputation—all while helping create a more sustainable world.

Keep up-to-date with HPE’s Living Progress via our @HPE_LivingProg Twitter account.