Winners Announced for QuEST Forum's First Annual Sustainability Awards

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Sep 15, 2015, 02:00 ET

DALLAS, Sept. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- QuEST Forum, a global organization dedicated to quality and sustainability in the ICT community, today named the winners of its First Annual Sustainability Awards. This honor recognizes organizations achieving excellence and showcasing energy, passion and innovation in Corporate Sustainability.

GENBAND's Brian Green and Chandana Badami were awarded QuEST Forum's First Annual Sustainability Award for Best Overall Performance by QuEST Forum Chair, Steve Pickett, and CEO, Fraser Pajak. GENBAND received the award during QuEST Forum's Executive Board dinner and reception on Monday evening during the Americas Best Practices Conference at the USS Midway.

ADVA Optical Networking's Klaus Grobe and Michael Huthart were awarded QuEST Forum's First Annual Sustainability Award for Most Improved by QuEST Forum Chair, Steve Pickett, and CEO, Fraser Pajak. ADVA received the award during QuEST Forum's Executive Board dinner and reception on Monday evening during the Americas Best Practices Conference at the USS Midway.

QuEST Forum is actively involved in issues related to sustainability and looks to its members to take leadership roles in sustainable practices. QuEST Forum created the Sustainability Awards to promote, encourage and honor the efforts of those serving as role models in fields of Sustainability. Entrants in the competition used their performance against the QuEST Forum model to share their progress to date. Winners were honored during a reception and ceremony on Monday evening at the association's Executive Board Dinner in conjunction with the Americas Best Practices Conference in San Diego, Calif.

The winners of the 2015 QuEST Forum Sustainability Awards are:

BEST OVERALL PERFORMANCE AWARD: GENBAND, a leading developer of real time communications software solutions, is recognized for overall achievement in Sustainability Best Practices. Just over a year ago the company embarked on an ambitious reworking of its operations, product design, and supply chain in a company-wide effort to improve sustainability. The process included training and education, auditing suppliers, implementing a lifecycle analysis, improving business continuity, reducing real-estate costs, adopting eco design techniques to improve products, benchmarking against the competition, modifying packaging, and implementing best practices. GENBAND's increased sustainability efforts are apparent through their reduction and optimization of natural resources, preventing hazardous substances from entering their products and recycling those materials required for operation in the global marketplace. These efforts are being complemented by ongoing work in educating employees and other stakeholders in sustainability and corporate social responsibility best practices.
MOST IMPROVED AWARD: ADVA Optical Networking creates new opportunities for tomorrow's networks and a new vision for a connected world. Their intelligent telecommunications hardware, software and services have been deployed by several hundred service providers and thousands of enterprises. ADVA Optical Networking is recognized for overall improvements in Sustainability Best Practices. ADVA's CTO, Dr. Christoph Glingener, has responsibility for sustainability. ADVA Optical Networking is one of the pilot members of the QuEST Forum Sustainability Initiative and an early adopter of the model now being used by the QuEST Forum Sustainability group. Working with British Telecom and epi Consulting, ADVA has made advances in their sustainability and CSR program to become recognized as a 'Silver Supplier' by British Telecom. ADVA now shares best practices at QuEST Forum events around the world.

"With over 30 global organizations now participating in the QuEST Forum Sustainability Initiative (SI), QuEST Forum wanted to give organizations an opportunity to be publicly recognized and rewarded as corporate sustainability leaders," Fraser Pajak, CEO of QuEST Forum said. "The challenge was selecting two winners from the numerous strong applications we received. We were extremely impressed by the depth of sustainable practices being used to improve the industry."

QuEST Forum's Sustainability Initiative is open to all companies in ICT, and has no cost requirements to participate. Those wishing to compete for the awards in 2016 need only join in this great work, improve their performance and enter to win next year. For more information on how to participate, click here.

About QuEST Forum

QuEST Forum is a global organization dedicated to quality and sustainability in the ICT community. We are very unique in that we create a collaborative environment for service providers and suppliers, who are often times competitors, to come together and develop innovative solutions to relevant industry issues. QuEST Forum unifies the ICT community through the implementation of TL 9000 (an ICT specific quality management system that is built on ISO 9001), performance benchmarking, and a broad array of common metrics that support rapid industry adoption of new technologies and consistent quality of communication networks around the world.

CONTACT: Courtney Brodbeck, [email protected]

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SOURCE QuEST Forum