Dear Microsoft Partners,

On behalf of the entire Dutch SMB team I want to share something with you.

To warm you up a little bit, I am not diving into the usual topics of our business just yet. Let's take some time and dive into some actualities and our history as human beings.

In times like these, polarization is a topic you can't avoid in our society. If we're talking about a pandemic, political choices, gender, sexual preferences, race, religion and other beliefs and convictions, we focus on our differences. We almost seem to forget that we have one common denominator; we are all human...

Where am I going with this? Hang in there for a little longer.

Let's zoom out and look at humans as a species living on this planet. Genetically we are 60% similar to bananas, 80% similar to cows and 99% similar to chimpanzees. Why are we the ones that put chimps in the zoo, while with 1% difference, it could also be the other way around?

Not sure if you read the book, for those Dutch speakers, ‘De meeste mensen deugen’, for the English-speaking people here, it has been translated; ‘Human Kind, a Hopeful History’. This is where Rutger Bregman, the author dedicates many pages to this theory and relates many studies.

What makes us as humans different? It's our ability to learn from each other. We are able to copy one another and develop it further in our own way. We refer to this as social learning. In a world where, as I just mentioned polarization is a topic - and in our field we are sometimes led by our competitiveness - we can be hesitant to share things with one another.

So, let's take this into account, as there is a burning problem that is closing in on us, and that is the status of our planet.

Sustainability is a topic where we need to stand together as a tech community and work together to make the world a better place for generations to come - and we can only do this if we do what humans are good at, social learning.

So why do I start with this in an SMB keynote?

It's because it is my true passion and felt responsibility that with our Microsoft SMB team, and you as partners, we can make a difference and change the way we work, and the way our customers work.

There is no denying it any longer, we must disrupt patterns and go out of our comfort zone, to raise the bar for a new standard. Technology is a solution.

The largest corporations in the Netherlands must already comply with new rules and standards, and it won't be long until SMB organization need to report their performance when it comes to Carbon, and eventually will need to pay for it. But what an opportunity as well. SMBs are agile, creative, flexible and most of all great passion can be found in these organizations. SMB is the place to start driving any change, and especially on the topic of sustainability.

Imagine, Microsoft is building a planetary computer where petabytes of data are stored and made available to partners who want to build on these insights and work on sustainability solutions. As Microsoft we are looking at our own carbon footprint, with the ambition to be carbon negative in 2030, and we want to have erased our entire carbon emission since the start of our company in 1975. Where we are also really trying to reduce waste (check out the example of Surface) and replenish more water that we use.

I have seen an example of a partner who is replanting trees on behalf of his customers to compensate for the carbon footprint the IT environment has. I see accountants shifting their business model to advice on sustainability towards their customers. In the end, not being sustainable will be expensive, and it will be difficult to thrive as an organization. There is no way around it.?As Microsoft, our focus is the group of our collective customers, with whom we need to have more and more conversations on the topic of sustainability, and we invite you to do the same. Think about your own operations, think about your customer's operations - what will you do to help our planet?

You don't need to be the expert, but start reading (Aka.ms/SustainableSMB), start talking about it, and feel inspired and especially empowered to start some new initiatives.

To make it really easy for you, for organizations in professional services, which I consider you all to be part of, the biggest footprint you have is mostly your Carbon footprint. This is mainly caused by the commute of you and your colleagues from home to the office or other destinations. Building a business case for the new world of work (soon to be reality), where people travel less to work, because they use technology more to have the same secure workplace, it reduces carbon production substantially.

Teams adoption, you don't think about sustainability when you think about using Teams, but logically you can think about the impact the use of Teams could have. Sending an email and storing that email in several locations takes up more processing power, that needs to be facilitated - where Teams avoids these duplicates. For the smallest message you share on teams, instead of an email, you save 5% CO2 - what if you have your customer include this more in their daily operations, instead of email – start calculating the impact.

The platform economy is booming, more platforms are raised for a variety of customer needs. Building smart solutions to bring products and services to customers in the smartest most efficient way is key. The number of platforms that we see evolving around the circular economy for example are great efforts, enabling consumers to leverage the same products and resources by renting them. Look at examples like Swapfiets, Felix, Cargoroo en ShareNow, all enabling the optimal use of transportation vehicles without people having to buy them and use far less frequently.

So, restaurants have built a new business model during the pandemic and are now facing challenges on how they work on a new situation where they run their restaurant, maybe still deliver food, but are also keen on limiting food waste. With partners like yourself and technology we can provide, there is a lot to do with data to optimize operations.

In construction you see prices of resources increasing, which means margins for organizations in construction are under pressure, so how can you optimize the way you purchase materials, ensuring the right price and quality? What happens to the materials after a building is torn down, can you recycle materials? What is the influence that has on the depreciation of the building?

These examples are all based on data. Data is the key for sustainable success for SMB organization, just like Enterprise organizations. If we help SMB organizations to see data as a valuable possession and maybe a gold mine for future success, they can make much more conscious decisions on where to invest, and how to optimize use of people, resources, and money.

In healthcare we see the pressure on the healthcare providers increasing, with the risk of the current virus, but maybe also ones in the future, and the lack of employees, we see that healthcare providers need to be smarter in the way they work. A huge opportunity to improve our healthcare system (#3 SDG) and make use of the momentum of digital disruption, by providing these guys with the right technology. How is this sustainable? It all contributes! If we digitize and optimize healthcare processes, we don't have written recipes that you need to hand in at the pharmacy where they print again the recipe to archive it in a different box for the insurance, less travel to and from health care centers, and an ability for our healthcare system to scale without expanding.

Security is a topic more than ever, especially with having so many hybrid work scenarios across all different industries, if a customer is not investing in her security solutions at this point, it might have a huge, and more expensive, problem in the future. The examples are all over the news when they become big enough and we as consumers are exposed to hot having cheese available in the supermarket, or personal data being exposed after visiting a museum or zoo.

With the 5G network available across all of the Netherlands in 2022, there are so many opportunities for IoT solutions within for example the agricultural sector. A sector that needs to transform significantly now and in the upcoming years, to stay alive, remain profitable and become sustainable. Not just within agriculture, but in many industries, the wide availability of 5G can disrupt the current status quo.

?And as already mentioned before, data should be the core of each SMBs strategy. It is an asset, and when used correctly, a differentiator for sustainable growth.

In conclusion, the climate problem, in combination with great tech infrastructure, and a mature market, makes that we can be the leaders in doing things differently. The entrepreneurial minds in this virtual room can challenge each other and learn from one another to surprise our customers by really driving a change and combining our capabilities and business drive with the force of doing good.

They go hand it hand, and it will bring you so much.

?There is an increasing expectation from society, customer and investors for their suppliers and partners to be sustainable. This group will only become bigger and bigger every day. Hopefully we can be partners that challenge each other, that can share with each other and copy from each other, as this purpose is no longer just an individual profit one, it should be our collective goal.

Join the conversation, start by attending our first of many more talk shows to come and please practice the beautiful art of social learning!

Join our talkshow 'Duurzame mkb'ers bereiken meer' by registering here, or start reading some inspirational stories on our blog here.