Why Dicker Data is making sustainability a "major focus"

In mid-January 2023, Dicker Data's general manager of marketing and strategy, Ben Johnson, told CRN that the IT distributor had seen more tender or RFI requests requesting a sustainable approach in the previous three months than in the previous year. He predicted that growth would increase.

Environmental sustainability is a challenge for businesses and government, but it's also being painted as an opportunity for their IT partners.

Dicker Data has a stake in both sides of the business sustainability story. It's taken steps to improve the sustainability of its own operations, and it sees an opportunity to help its partners and their customers do the same.

That opportunity is increasing, according to Johnson.

“What we're finding now is that there is a huge appetite from the end customers for partners that can come with a sustainability lens and build the solutions that they need to be able to deploy and reach their business goals, but also do it in a sustainable way. And so we see that growing,” he said.

Opportunities for IT partners

Responsible production and recycling of devices remains one way IT providers can help. Johnson sees an opportunity for Dicker Data to help partners with this.

When a partner engages with us, how can we make it clearer that they're looking at a sustainable product versus a normal product?”

“We want to make it easy for our partners to make a sustainable choice because the choice that our partners make today and the choice that their end users make today in relation to their technology can have a profound effect when those technologies and products go end-of-life or end-of-use.”

These issues are driving some IT resellers to play a bigger role in the lifecycle of devices, he noted.

“We also see a lot of partners wanting to go full lifecycle on the technology now. So they want to not only be upfront from selling the device to managing the device, but they now want to become involved in the end-of-life process for the device in terms of recovering it securely, destroying the data, and then ensuring it's either recycled or sold off into another market – be that locally or internationally – so that the device can continue its life beyond just the standard, lifespan it would've had in a corporate environment.”

Energy costs are another obvious area for attention. Johnson said a lot of Dicker Data partners are looking to help customers reduce the impact of running IT. TCO calculators can help, and there are also carbon accounting and ESG reporting tools available from the likes of Microsoft and others.

“The transparency that some of these solutions will bring will be very welcome, I think, by a lot of organisations because it will give them insights to the impact that their business is having on the planet,” Johnson said.

“But also, the vendors that make the technology, or make the insights into the impact that the technology's having easier, I think will grow, because with these mandatory ASX and ASIC requirements coming in, businesses will be looking for ways to transparently report that and be able to show their investors and their shareholders that they're doing the right thing and that they're moving in the right direction when it comes to their sustainability approach.”

Operating Dicker Data off the grid

Dicker Data is expanding its distribution facility in Kurnell, NSW, and plans to add another thousand solar panels to the facility.

IT providers also have the sustainability of their own businesses to consider. At Dicker Data, this came to the fore with the development of its $74 million headquarters and distribution facility, which opened in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire in 2021. The company is now expanding that facility and its use of solar energy.

“So, we started with around 600 solar panels on the roof, which has enabled us to run off the grid or even top up the grid on a sunny day,” Johnson explained. “But we're actually expanding our warehouse at the moment and as a part of that process we're actually going to add just short of another thousand solar panels onto our roof. So that's going to give us the ability to operate off grid, even on cloudy days.”

The Dicker Data site in Kurnell also features electric vehicle charging stations. “We initially put those in as a bit of an incentive for our staff to consider switching to EVs. By making that a free incentive, we thought that might help people consider the shift,” Johnson said.

“We've actually got the infrastructure in place here to expand that quite significantly as the number of people with EVs grows over time.”

Development of the Kurnell site involved the planting of more than 130,000 trees, grasses and shrubs. Dicker Data is using water from a retention basin surrounding the facility.

“What we've found is that that basin basically retains rainwater and is then used for the restroom facilities around the business. But also, we then test the quality of that water when we start to retain too much, and then we pump that water back out into the local Botany Bay surrounding areas to basically enrich and promote the ecology of the local area there.”

Inside the Dicker Data facility, the company has also eliminated petrochemical and plastic void fills that would've been used in shipments, Johnson said.

Still, he said “we're also very aware that there's a lot more work to be done.”

The employment factor

Regulation hasn't been the only driver of these changes within Dicker Data, said Johnson.

“There were some levels of legislation that we had to, of course, adhere to. But what we've done as a company is often taken what we had to do as a bare minimum and then implemented more than it,” he said.

“An example is the electric vehicle charging. That started as a suggestion that came from an external party that was helping us with the approval process. But we thought, we can see an uptake in this. We can see a future in this. And so that's what drove us to then put the infrastructure in, to cater for future expansion of that network.”

There are many other factors, including the employment market, driving the company’s sustainability efforts, according to Johnson.

“If you look out there at the moment, a lot of people want to work for businesses that are aligned to their sustainability or their environmental beliefs. And so what we've found is we've been quite successful securing new talent in the IT market, which is a very demanding market, as we all know, simply by being able to lean into our story on sustainability.”

"Next wave of enablement"

Johnson talked up sustainability as a “major focus” for Dicker Data as it seeks to help its partners identify, adopt, and sell sustainable technology.

“Partners have always been central to the customers that they work with, and they've always been business enablers. And this is the next wave of enablement that your customers are going to look to you for,” he said.

“All of this applies whether you're an MSSP, a traditional IT reseller, systems integrator, or an ISV or anything in between. There's an opportunity for all of you here.”

Read the State of Sustainability report, a collaboration between CRN, iTnews and Digital Nation Australia that explores this issue from the perspective of the IT channel, CIOs and CTOs, and business executives.