Many companies make a public commitment to protecting the environment, including ours. However, many people don’t realize that for us, our commitment to conserving our natural resources isn’t just a matter of corporate goodwill, or a way of giving back – it is the reason Service Objects came into being. In this article, we’d like to share a little history with you, as well as a little more about our current conservation efforts.
The Service Objects story
Most people know Service Objects nowadays as the leading provider of real-time global contact validation solutions. We have now validated nearly 5 billion contact records worldwide, major firms such as Amazon, American Express and Microsoft rely on us for their mission-critical business operations, and our state-of-the-art manned data centers operate 24/7/365. But fewer people know how and why we started.
Twenty years ago, in 2001, our founder and CEO Geoff Grow – an ardent environmentalist and a successful software entrepreneur – got interested in solving the problems of waste and inefficiency through mathematical equations. Fueled in part by the amount of duplicate and misdirected junk mail he personally received, he decided to focus on the waste stream resulting from bad contact data and direct mail, and so Service Objects and its flagship address validation services were born.
Back then, bad contact data was simply a fact of life for most businesses, and firms absorbed this as a cost of doing business. But with the growth of cloud-based tools such Service Objects’ Address Validation, which could put the power entire US Postal Service right inside your applications, it suddenly became easy – and eventually, competitively necessary – to have accurate, genuine and up-to-date contacts. Today, Service Objects has now grown to offer over 25 products for data quality and business intelligence, serving a wide range of markets.
Our conservation commitment
First and foremost, our products continue to have the environmental impact that they were designed for. We now keep over 300 tons of paper from reaching landfills each month, and as of 2021, we estimated having saved over 2 million trees and nearly one billion gallons of water, as well as roughly 80 million pounds of air pollution.
Beyond the impact of our product line, we also continue to work proactively in support of environmental conservation. For example, our partnership with the One Tree Planted organization (www.onetreeplanted.org) supports reforestation efforts in our home state of California, planting 10 trees for each new customer as part a consortium of companies with a goal of repopulating the state with over one million new trees.
Finally, our own business operations continue to reflect our ongoing commitment to the environment. We are serious about reducing waste and employing recycling as part of our business processes, and have always worked to reduce vehicle dependence by offering employee incentives for walking or biking to work. More recently, in light of the recent pandemic, we have made permanent moves to have a smaller physical office footprint and greatly increase work-from-home options for our team, without sacrificing the technical innovation and 24/7 support we are known for.
Helping you protect the environment
Above all, we never forget our mission to help YOU conserve resources, by using our products to reduce waste, fraud and human resources in your business activities. Everything we do still revolves around helping you run more efficiently, and in turn helping the world.
While we have grown over the past 20 years to become the industry leader in contact data validation, the future of our shared planet remains at the core of everything we do. To learn more about Service Objects’ commitment to the environment, click here for more details. And for more information about any of Service Objects’ data quality products, please contact us.
