Reed: One of SAP's most important themes of the year is, without a doubt, sustainability. We heard a lot about SAP sustainability initiatives at Sapphire, and it will be a major story at the SAP TechEd events this fall as well. It seems like these utilities' hot button issues directly tie into sustainability, so I wondered how you see the utilities industry sector perceiving sustainability and its relevance to their businesses.

McClelland: Sustainability has almost got a two-prong definition, and everything will always tie back to the utility now. We hear about carbon reductions. So if you're going to be a sustainable or a "clear" utility, you now need to change from the historic ways that we created energy with very high carbon emissions: the high pollutants such as oil, coal and fossil fuels. We have to move away from that into cleaner-type technologies, whether it's creating solar, wind or tidal power.

One sustainability message is around the type of power: it's got to be cleaner, it's got to be greener. The second message on sustainability parlays back to energy efficiency. We as consumers need to be more concerned about how much energy we use. It's always going to be a growing sense, not only how we become more efficient as consumers, but how utilities can market to their consumer base to explain how to become more efficient.

As a utility, we see increasing demand for power, but we just can't keep building power plants to balance off the demand and supply. How can I get more use out of a maximum amount of energy we can make, and do it cleaner as well? Those really are the two prongs around sustainability for utilities, how that utility will still be here 50 years in the future.

Reed: James, this is a very interesting conversation, and I'm sure many listeners would also want to know how they could follow some of these topic threads at Utilities at BPX. Can you tell us about some of the resources and topics on the Utilities at BPX Community right now?

McClelland: We're trying to get more of an up-tick in support from our consumer base. Part of that is to get people to fully understand what the value is of going to SAP Utilities at BPX. The key areas we've just started up on our BPX community are AMI (this is really a worldwide hot topic) and asset management, being able to get the most out of your assets and making them the most profitable. Every utility, as we stated, is asset intensive, so this is important.

The third key area that we're really hoping will get a great deal of interest is around Enterprise System Architects. These are the people at each of our utilities who we hope can have a better understanding of what they have when they've invested into their SAP solution.

To give you an analogy, it's the same as if you and I had Ferraris; we had the identical model, the identical year, we bought it from the identical car shop. But you take yours to your mechanic and I take mine to my mechanic, and you get much better gas mileage and much more horsepower than I'm ever getting. The trick comes down to that System Architect - how we've put it together, how we've tuned the system. If your mechanic understands what's under the hood better than my mechanic, this is where you're getting much more return on your investment.

I think that's a real key. We're trying to put together a very big drive and community for our utilities worldwide so that if you're all running the same software, you should be able to gather a great deal of the same benefits. We're having our first Enterprise Architect community meeting face-to-face at our upcoming International Utility Conference in Munich, Germany, this October that everybody is welcome to attend.

We also have a North America Utilities Conference, and we'll be trying to have an Enterprise Architect meeting as well, coming up in September in Washington, D.C. this year. These will be the kickoff meetings for our Enterprise Architects to get them to understand and put the rules together of what they'd like to get out of this BPX community. This will be a forum where they can trade and share ideas or ask questions to fully understand what they've got, what their corporation has invested in, and to maximize what they can get out of their SAP investment.

Reed: In the BPX world we talk a lot about the seeming convergence of technical and business skills. It seems like this program is really going to attract that type of individual, so it sounds like a promising initiative.

McClelland: The goal is to bring together both the technical and the business, that you can either speak within that track or cross these ideas. That's really what we're hoping and what I believe will be truly successful in the BPX communities.

Reed: We've covered a lot of different topics in this podcast. Were there any final words, any Utilities at BPX that we haven't talked about or any additional plans you want to share?

McClelland: The key goal is to get our consumers to come in and make comments. This allows us to have a better pulse of our customer base as well, to be more responsive to our customer queries but also to help shed light on what's coming down the pike. We can't always get out in front of all of our customers. There are privacy laws on how much we can push out to our customers, whether through email or through newsletters.

I think this is a great community to share ideas with. And, again, with the upcoming conferences we mentioned, such as the international event in October, our goal is to share with those who aren't able to attend some "best of" presentations so everybody can still share in that wealth.

Reed: James, thanks for giving us this insightful view of all these interesting developments in the utilities industry and also how to pick up on the discussions at Utilities at BPX. Best of luck with your plans this fall and we'll check back in on you soon.

Before we sign off, I'd like to make sure that our listeners know how to access the Utilities at BPX Community. If you're not yet registered with SAP's online communities, you can register for the SAP Developer Network, the SAP BPX Community and the SAP Business Objects Community at the same time. If you're already signed up for one of the communities but not signed up for SAP BPX yet, you can simply update your profile and check off the BPX Community on your member information.

The Utilities at BPX Community can be found by clicking on the industries menu on the left hand side of the BPX website, then click the service industry submenu, select utilities to go on to Utilities at BPX. We will, of course, include a link to Utilities at BPX in our podcast description. I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today on this BPX Community podcast. With that, this is Jon Reed of JonERP.com signing off. We'll see you online soon at bpx.sap.com.