A big idea with a commitment to innovation
Siemens Financial Services (SFS) strives to help customers innovate and stay competitive. That’s why the Digital Business Optimizer (DBO™) was developed. The DBO – a free software tool that helps customers baseline business performance around critical key performance indicators (KPIs).
JUNE 2025
By: Erika Gupta and Tom Burns
The Big Idea
Siemens Financial Services (SFS) strives to help customers innovate and stay competitive. That’s why the Digital Business Optimizer (DBO™) was developed. The DBO – a free software tool backed by seven trusted data sources – helps customers baseline business performance around critical key performance indicators (KPIs), such as a strong return on investment (ROI), emissions reporting, and natural hazard risk mitigation.
The Challenge
Many companies, specifically Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), often lack the data necessary to baseline business performance. SFS sought to help customers estimate and identify pathways to improve ROI, lower their carbon footprint, and make their facilities more resilient against natural hazards.
The Team
By combining the technological know-how from Siemens Foundational Technologies, Siemens’ in-house research and development team, and business acumen from SFS, two teams came together to address a customer pain point. It’s that mix of technology and finance which allows Siemens to create impactful solutions, such as the DBO.
When we look at hiring people, we ask them why they are considering Siemens over other companies. The people who come to Siemens want to work for a company that has purpose. When you start from that foundation, it is amazing how fast and how successful you can be in driving change
The Solution
Early on, the team decided that they would use as much publicly available data as possible to increase the transparency and trustworthiness of the solution for their customers.
The DBO uses data from a multitude of sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States Department of Energy (US DOE), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide companies with baseline metrics. It helps companies know where to start to reduce costs and save money by generating scenarios to most cost effectively reach their goals.
Users can discover and choose a combination of generation and storage technologies that makes the most sense for their site such as solar panels, combined heat and power (CHP), thermal energy storage, battery storage, and more. Further, users can customize scenarios based on a desire for specific technologies, increased resilience to grid outages, or a maximum budget, enabling data-driven decarbonization decision making. The DBO’s natural hazard risk mitigation functionality uses the same information entered for a decarbonization scenario, but identifies what the top natural hazard risks are at a location and what measures a customer can take to mitigate them.
The Prototype
The Siemens Foundational Technologies team developed an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-native initial prototype that used AWS core infrastructure and concentrated mostly on getting a functional prototype running. An AWS solutions architect met with the team and offered help from AWS experts in taking the prototype to a released application.
Over the course of the next year, AWS and Siemens worked together to optimize the performance, resilience, cost, environmental impact, and security of the DBO product.
Optimization helps reduce the carbon emissions of the workload simply by running on AWS. A 2024 Accenture study commissioned by AWS found that moving a platform onto the AWS cloud reduces carbon emissions. Specifically, AWS is up to 4.1 times more energy-efficient than on-premises, and running optimized workloads on AWS can lower the associated carbon footprint by up to 99% (How moving onto the AWS cloud reduces carbon emissions).
Together, the teams were able to significantly increase the functionality and performance of the tool while reducing the costs by 50 percent.
Unanticipated Challenges
However, the team faced a few unexpected challenges and setbacks:
- Some software used for the prototype had very restrictive licensing terms that made it impossible to use in a production software-as-a-service (SaaS) system.
- Some of the infrastructure elements were monolithic blocks of code that were more suited to use in virtual machines than in the serverless architecture the team was planning for the production deployment. Refactoring this software was a large element of the project timeline.
Together, SFS and AWS found solutions to overcome these challenges, and the successful prototype was turned into a fully deployed and free-to-use SaaS application that became available to the public in September 2024.
Win-Win Deployment
The DBO was initially targeted at SMEs, but both US government entities and large companies are gaining value from using it to optimize the carbon footprint of their facilities.
The DBO is a free tool and is offered to Siemens’ suppliers for their carbon footprint reporting if they do not have data available. The DBO highlights Siemens’ continued commitment to help our customers and suppliers win in a changing world, making SFS’s loan portfolios more competitive and resilient to climate risks, while solving some of society’s toughest challenges. The DBO started with the drive to help customers continuously innovate and compete in their industries, and SFS is constantly improving the tool to meet their needs.
If you want to know more about the technical details behind the building and deployment of DBO, please see this blog post jointly written by the SFS and AWS technical teams.
Erika Gupta is Head of Sustainability at Siemens Financial Services Americas
Tom Burns is a Principal Sustainability Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services
Legal disclaimer: SIEMENS FINANCIAL SERVICES, INC. (SFS) IS NOT A REGISTERED MUNICIPAL ADVISOR AND IS NOT AN ADVISOR TO OR FIDUCIARY OF YOU OR YOUR COMPANY. ANY RESULTS IN THE DBO ARE AN ESTIMATE ONLY. FOR YOUR SITE-SPECIFIC ANALYSIS, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO CONTACT AN ENERGY ENGINEER. ANY RESULTS IN THE DBO ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND SFS MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO RECIPIENT, RECIPIENT’S CORPORATION, EMPLOYER, BUSINESS ENTITY OR ANY THIRD PARTY CONCERNING THE RESULTS, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES FOR PERFORMANCE, COMPLETENESS, ACCURACY, MERCHANTABILITY, OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. SIEMENS DISCLAIMS ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ERRORS OR OMISSIONS IN SUCH RESULTS, OR RECIPIENT’S OR ANY THIRD PARTY’S RELIANCE ON SUCH RESULTS.