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What is ESG?

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. It encompasses a company's commitment to operating in a way that considers its impact on the environment, society, and its own governance structure. • Environmental: This pillar focuses on a company's environmental impact, including its carbon emissions, resource consumption, and pollution prevention efforts. Key aspects include climate change mitigation, water conservation, waste reduction, and the transition to renewable energy sources. • Social: This pillar addresses a company's impact on society, encompassing human rights, labor practices, community engagement, and customer health and safety. It includes ensuring fair wages, safe working conditions, respecting human rights throughout the supply chain, and contributing positively to the communities in which the company operates. • Governance: This pillar focuses on a company's leadership, ethics, and transparency. Key aspects include board diversity, executive compensation, anti-corruption measures, and effective risk management.

Why is ESG Relevant Today?

The relevance of ESG stems from a confluence of factors. Firstly, investors are increasingly prioritizing ESG factors in their investment decisions. Recognizing the long-term financial risks associated with environmental and social issues, investors are seeking companies that demonstrate strong ESG performance. Secondly, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of sustainability and ethical business practices. They are more likely to support companies that align with their values and prioritize environmental and social responsibility. Furthermore, regulatory scrutiny surrounding ESG issues is intensifying. Governments worldwide are implementing stricter environmental regulations and increasing pressure on companies to disclose ESG information. Finally, strong ESG performance enhances a company's reputation and attracts top talent. By demonstrating a commitment to sustainability and social responsibility, companies can build trust with stakeholders, improve their brand image, and differentiate themselves in the competitive marketplace.

The Impact of ESG on Businesses

Integrating ESG principles into business operations can yield significant benefits: 1. Enhanced Financial Performance: • Improved Risk Management: By proactively identifying and mitigating environmental and social risks, companies can enhance their financial stability and reduce their exposure to potential losses. • Increased Access to Capital: Investors are increasingly allocating capital to ESG-aligned investments. This can lead to improved access to capital and potentially lower borrowing costs for companies with strong ESG performance. • Improved Operational Efficiency: Implementing sustainable practices, such as energy efficiency measures and waste reduction initiatives, can lead to cost savings and improved operational efficiency. 2. Enhanced Reputation and Brand Value: • Attracting and Retaining Customers: Consumers are increasingly choosing to support companies with strong ESG credentials. By demonstrating a commitment to sustainability and social responsibility, companies can attract and retain loyal customers. • Attracting and Retaining Talent: Top talent, particularly younger generations, are increasingly seeking employment with companies that prioritize ESG. Strong ESG performance can help attract and retain the most talented employees. 3. Driving Innovation: • Developing Sustainable Solutions: Integrating ESG considerations can drive innovation and the development of new products and services that address environmental and social challenges. This can lead to new revenue streams and competitive advantages. • Companies can further amplify their ESG initiatives by aligning themselves with external sustainability movements. For example, joining the Trillion Trees (1t.org) initiative demonstrates a commitment to large-scale environmental restoration efforts, specifically by contributing to the ambitious goal of conserving, restoring, and growing one trillion trees globally. By participating in this initiative, companies not only contribute to vital environmental restoration efforts but also gain valuable recognition for their commitment to climate action and biodiversity conservation. Similarly, aligning with Pledge 1% (pledge1percent.org) signifies a dedication to philanthropy and social responsibility. This initiative encourages companies to contribute 1% of their equity, employee time, product, or profit to charitable causes. By joining Pledge 1%, companies can actively support non-profit organizations working on critical social issues, such as poverty reduction, education, and healthcare. This demonstrates a commitment to making a positive social impact beyond their core business operations and fosters a strong sense of corporate social responsibility within the company. At Beinex, we are deeply committed to ESG principles and strive to integrate sustainability into all aspects of our business. We believe that strong ESG practices are not only essential for environmental and social responsibility but also crucial for long-term business success. We are actively exploring opportunities to align with external sustainability initiatives such as the Trillion Trees initiative and Pledge 1%. These partnerships will further solidify our commitment to environmental restoration and social impact, allowing us to contribute meaningfully to a more sustainable and equitable future. These external partnerships not only enhance a company's ESG profile but also provide valuable opportunities for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and collective impact. By joining forces with other like-minded organizations and individuals, companies can leverage their resources and expertise to address pressing global challenges and create a more sustainable and equitable future.

Making a Net Positive Impact

To effectively integrate ESG into their business strategy, companies must set clear, measurable ESG targets, integrate ESG considerations into all aspects of their operations, and regularly track and report on their progress. Engaging with stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, and investors, is crucial for understanding their expectations and incorporating their feedback into ESG initiatives. Going beyond mere compliance with regulations, businesses can strive to make a net positive impact on society and the environment. • Collaborative Partnerships: Collaborating with other businesses, NGOs, and government agencies to address systemic challenges and drive collective action on sustainability. • Leading by Example: Serving as a role model for other companies in the industry by demonstrating best practices in sustainability and social responsibility. • Investing in Innovation: Investing in research and development of innovative technologies and solutions that address environmental and social challenges.

1. Snowflake Iceberg Tables Now Generally Available

Snowflake Iceberg Tables have moved to general availability, offering full storage interoperability with the Apache Iceberg open table format. This feature facilitates easier governance and collaboration on Iceberg data stored externally, enhancing the flexibility of data lakehouses, data lakes, and data meshes. Over 300 customers have already adopted Iceberg in its public preview, highlighting its potential to broaden Snowflake's data footprint.

2. Advancements in Snowflake Cortex AI

Snowflake introduced several enhancements to Cortex AI, including:

• • Cortex Analyst: Built with Meta's Llama 3 and Mistral Large models, this tool allows businesses to build applications securely on top of Snowflake's analytical data.
• • Cortex Search: Leveraging Neeva's retrieval and ranking technology, it facilitates the development of apps against documents and text-based datasets.
• • Cortex Guard: Aiming to ensure model safety, it filters and flags harmful content, including violence and hate speech.
• • Document AI: This feature, powered by Snowflake Arctic-TILT multimodal LLM, will soon allow users to extract data from documents such as invoices and contracts.

3. Introduction of Polaris Catalog

The Polaris Catalog is a vendor-neutral, open catalog implementation for Apache Iceberg, providing cross-engine interoperability and greater flexibility. It will become open-sourced within 90 days, supporting a variety of engines, including Apache Flink, Apache Spark, and Trino.

4. Private Preview of Snowflake Horizon Updates

Snowflake launched a private preview of an internal model marketplace within Snowflake Horizon. This marketplace enables users to publish and curate models, applications, and data products for internal use ensuring controlled access and preventing unintended external sharing. Other upcoming features include AI model sharing and AI-powered object descriptions.

5. AI & ML Improvements

• • Snowflake AI & ML Studio: A no-code interactive interface for AI development, now in private preview.
• • Cortex Fine-Tuning: In public preview, allowing customization of pre-trained models for specialized tasks.
• • ML Lineage: In private preview, offering traceability across ML life cycles.
• • Feature Store: Now in public preview, for creating, managing, and serving ML features.

6. Snowflake Native Apps with Snowpark Container Services — Preview

Snowflake introduced the integration of the Native App Framework with Snowpark Container Services on AWS. This integration provides developers with configurable GPU and CPU instances for various applications, from computer vision to geospatial data analysis. Over 160 Snowflake Native Apps are now available in the marketplace.

7. Developer Tool Enhancements

Several updates aimed at developers include:

• • Snowflake Notebooks: Snowflake Notebooks is now in preview, offering an interactive, cell-based programming environment for Python and SQL within Snowsight. It enables exploratory data analysis, machine learning model development, and other data science tasks all in one place.
• • Snowpark pandas API: Allows the use of pandas syntax for AI and pipeline development within Snowflake. The Snowpark pandas API is now in preview, allowing you to run pandas code directly on Snowflake data. This API offers a pandas-native experience with Snowflake's scalability and security, handling larger datasets without rewriting pandas pipelines.
• • Database Change Management: A public preview feature for DevOps, including Git integration.
• • Python API and CLI: Soon to be generally available, facilitating CI/CD practices.

8. Expanded Cloud Footprint and Governance

Snowflake announced a new data boundary for the EU, ensuring regional data residency and compliance. Additionally, a Department of Defense (DoD) environment meeting IL4 security controls will be available, highlighting Snowflake's commitment to robust data governance and security.

9. Snowflake Trail

The new Trail set of observability capabilities was unveiled, providing developers with tools to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize workflows. Trail integrates with platforms like Grafana, Metaplane, and Slack, adhering to OpenTelemetry standards.

10. Snowflake Cortex Fine-Tuning — Preview

Cortex Fine-Tuning, now in preview, lets users adapt pre-trained models for specialized tasks. This managed service fine-tunes popular large language models using your data within Snowflake, enhancing model performance for specific use cases.

The preview of Snowpark Native Apps with Snowpark Container Services enables running containerized services within Snowflake Native Apps. This feature supports provider IP protection, security, data sharing, monetization, and integration with compute resources.

11. Snowpark Python Local Testing Framework — General Availability

The Snowpark Python local testing framework is now generally available. This emulator allows you to test Python code locally with Snowpark Python DataFrames, facilitating development and CI pipeline integration without needing a Snowflake account connection.

12. Universal Search and Snowsight Updates

Universal Search, now generally available, allows users to search for content across Snowflake storage, external Iceberg storage, and third-party providers. Snowsight also received a dark mode feature, enhancing user experience in low-light conditions.

13. New Geospatial Functions in Preview

Four new functions for GEOGRAPHY objects are now available in preview:

• • H3_TRY_COVERAGE: A special version of H3_COVERAGE that returns NULL if an error occurs when attempting to return an array of IDs (INTEGER values) identifying the minimal set of H3 cells that completely cover a shape.
• • H3_TRY_COVERAGE_STRINGS: Similar to H3_TRY_COVERAGE but returns hexadecimal IDs (VARCHAR values).
• • H3_TRY_POLYGON_TO_CELLS: Returns an array of INTEGER values of the IDs of H3 cells with centroids contained by a Polygon, returning NULL if an error occurs.
• • H3_TRY_POLYGON_TO_CELLS_STRINGS: Similar to H3_TRY_POLYGON_TO_CELLS but returns VARCHAR values.
With innovations in AI, data governance, and developer tools, Snowflake continues to drive forward the capabilities of its platform, ensuring customers can leverage data more effectively and securely. The future looks promising as Snowflake expands its offerings and strengthens its ecosystem, providing powerful solutions.

Benefits: Enhanced Data Cloud Capabilities

The partnership will let Beinex turbocharge services on the AI-ML, analytics fronts by utilising storage and compute scalability unlocked by the unique collaboration. It awards Beinex and its clients the capability to flourish in terms of cost leadership, domain leadership and added utilisation of potential in sync with market conditions.

Data marketplace enhancement

The partnership also means that acquiring and testing third-party data is now easier which also entails the Snowflake users to imbibe the expanded third-party data into their environment, attach it to their first-party data and evaluate the data efficacy vis-à-vis customer experience along with the impact it can create.

There is little doubt that the capability is very much in demand as Beinex clients are into delivering powerful customer/ user experience as a part of their service efforts

Features:

• Privacy-safe
• Secure sharing platform
• No need to set up extra secure portals to support sharing of Personally Identifiable Information

UAE data residency requirements are also met thanks to the Snowflake domestic capacity.

The power of partnership

Beinex partnership with Snowflake enables it to offer clients advanced features like automated tuning and elastic compute with unlimited decoupled computing capability, along with the analytics modernization services, to help organisations realise exponential Return on Investment. This upgrade in status will take business to the next level for both Beinex and its esteemed client line-up.

Partnerships are what make Beinex stronger. The company has strong partnerships with some of the leading technology firms, research labs, and universities around the globe.

Businesses can leverage the power of our partner ecosystem to maximize the value of their end-to-end analytics journey.

Beinex is ecstatic to receive this recognition as a Snowflake select services tier partner and is grateful to Snowflake for acknowledging its client services.

These days we are into the 2-D screen of our mobile phones and watch videos and shows and engage in many more activities. But we are not carried away to that place or get immersed in it. Through the metaverse, that is possible. Here you can have an avatar which can act as a replica of your physical self. You can indulge in anything from hanging out with pals, participating in sports or workout sessions, learning new courses or activities, attending events, or shopping.

What are the possibilities Metaverse offers?

Using the limitless opportunities, you can virtually own digital clothing, buy land, construct buildings, start businesses, visit nightclubs and shopping centres, and even buy digital artworks. Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are used in the metaverse to digitally represent physical assets like art, music, in-game goods, and videos. They can be purchased and sold online. An evolving business strategy called "Direct-to-avatar" (D2A) makes it possible to sell and buy goods directly to avatars or other digital identities in virtual environments. Here, the possibilities are just boundless. Considering the future prospects, many brands like Adidas, Nike and Gucci, to name a few, have invested in the metaverse. As Gen Z and millennials are already spending a considerable amount of time in the virtual world, it is anticipated that by the end of 2022, the global VR sector will generate over $6.71 billion in revenue, and by 2024, it will be around $12.19 billion.

Metaverse generates value in customer experience by providing real-life interactions and can revolutionise user experience. Let’s see how it can be done:

1. Providing Unique Customised Experiences

Customisation plays a crucial part in today’s business world, as does in the metaverse. Businesses struggle to tailor the experience for each consumer, whether they prefer to purchase online or go to a physical store. Thankfully, the metaverse can guarantee that each customer's experience in an online store is distinctive. Customers can browse products geared toward their unique needs rather than browsing products that are of no interest to them. Additionally, the metaverse encourages connectedness, so consumers may share their experiences with other metaverse users and read reviews of goods and services before making a purchase.

Sports gear giant Adidas is one step ahead of the game by providing virtual gear for the virtual world and metaverse. Major apparel retailers like Macy's, Adidas, and Modcloth have already adopted virtual dressing rooms to enable customers to visualise a garment on their body without actually trying it on. The Swedish furniture retailer IKEA has already released an augmented reality catalogue app that lets you view how various pieces of furniture would look in your home. Nike owns Nikeland, a virtual world which is a free immersive sports space where you participate in sporting events from your computer or phone through your unique avatar.

2. Trials Using Virtual and Augmented Reality

Earlier trials were provided only for digital products, but with the help of the metaverse, we can experience every product virtually. For instance, we can choose a hotel to stay in after virtually experiencing the facilities provided by it. That’s cool, isn’t it? The metaverse uses augmented and virtual reality to give users a fully immersive experience. Customers who engage in immersive experiences may be able to do things that they otherwise might not have been able to do or uniquely do things. From buying lipstick after a virtual trial to buying a car after a virtual drive allows customers to explore and experience more realistically. Customers can currently utilise augmented reality through apps in a limited way, but the metaverse will allow them to experience the product from a close-up and personal perspective. For instance, Hyundai’s mobility adventure enables a vivid virtual experience.

BMW's augmented reality experiences enable automobile buyers to modify their desired vehicles in showrooms with the help of their tablets or smartphones. Alternatively, consumers can don virtual reality goggles to experience what it's like to drive cars, which will help them comprehend their options and select the best option available for their new car.

3. Accessible from Anywhere

The metaverse offers businesses plenty of advertising opportunities, but it also enables customers to interact with the people, places, and brands that interest them. Businesses can provide customers with experiences that let them explore their interests in greater detail without leaving the comfort of their homes and provide free samples of real-world events.

For people for whom it is not always feasible or economical to attend events in real life, the metaverse is the ideal replacement. Through 3D virtual worlds and avatars, users can enjoy affordable front-row access to various events with a level of immersion that must be experienced. Thanks to simple navigation, which places them in a metaverse tailored to their interests.

If you want to go shopping and there is no time for that, you can access it virtually from anywhere. To cite an example, for interior designing of your house, you can try different pieces or types of furniture from a virtual shop by arranging those in a digital representation of your house. Customers could quickly see whether the sofa would go with the colour scheme of their floor or wall or whether a wardrobe would fit in the available area. Ikea, the furniture brand, has already provided virtual experiences for customers. Buying land without the help of an agent is possible through Upland, a virtual real estate software that lets users browse and buy virtual property connected to actual towns and cities.

4. Strengthen Customer Experience

Companies now offer advice and assistance in addition to goods and services. Metaverse enables businesses to develop natural relationships with clients that weren't feasible with earlier forms of technology. Through virtual reality, customers experience ‘story-living’ rather than just ‘story-telling’. Shoppers can have a distinctive customer experience as they can purchase through experiencing it, have opinions about it, interact with other users and ask questions in the metaverse itself.

The businesses are testing out virtual and augmented retail on various platforms. Within the Roblox online multiplayer game, Gucci and Nike have unveiled fashion shows. In Fortnite, Balenciaga has begun offering high-end clothing. Additionally, the South Korean social avatar app Zepeto, Ralph Lauren, and Adidas have introduced interactive experiences. In the meantime, Charlotte Tilbury has established a virtual cosmetic store.

The journey doesn't end with how companies interact with customers in the metaverse. Businesses that use the metaverse's advantages ensure their clients have a customised experience that develops at the same rate as the metaverse. It's time for businesses to be prepared to adopt the impending metaverse and become early adopters before it is too late. Even though the metaverse is the next frontier of internet technology and consumer experience enhancement, massive adoption and accessibility are crucial. It's vital for business owners to begin learning about how these virtual worlds function, what opportunities and problems there are, and how to take advantage as soon as possible.

[sc name="quote" quote="“The functions, even as they may look simple, are pretty useful for any Tableau Consultant especially if they are working on finance-related projects,”" author="Joseph John, Senior Consultant, Analytics, Beinex"][/sc]

What is Tableau Sum and Running Sum?

Sum

SUM is one of the commonly performed functions in Tableau. The Tableau Sum function seeks out the Sum of records under consideration. It is the total of the values present in a field. The screenshot provided below exhibits the total sum of sales for each of the three categories as given in Sheet 1.

In the sample dataset shown below, the sum of sales is shown corresponding to each of the corresponding values in the dimension "Category". For example, "Furniture" has a total sale of 754,748, which could be comprising of furniture related products such as Tables, Chairs etc.

Running Sum

A RUNNING SUM is a cumulative total in a row or column from the first value to the final value in the respective row or column. For instance, in the example given below, the cumulative values of Furniture and Office Supplies stand at 1,486,641 and that value when added to Technology’s value of 839,893 gives 2,326,534.

You can summarise or modify the granularity of your data using aggregate functions. An aggregate part combines the values of multiple lines to provide a single value. Examples of aggregate functions apart from sum are measurements based on Count, Count Distinct, Fixed Calculations, and other standard integration functions.

Every time you include a measure in your view, an aggregate is automatically applied to that measure. Depending on the context of the view, different aggregation techniques are used. Analysts can well utilise these features to simplify the whole complex process of data analysis, and organisations can harness them for insightful decisions.