Sustainability Software, Part 1: It's Easy Being Green

As the decades-old "sustainability" movement goes mainstream, many businesses are looking to software to make the eco-cause concept functional -- and profitable -- for them.

Companies are facing accountability and responsibility demands regarding their roles in rescuing humanity and saving planet Earth from global warming, climate change, environmental degradation and the exhaustion of basic resources like fossil fuels. The pressure is coming from all sides -- national, state and local governments, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the United Nations, investors, customers, employees, stakeholders. Corporations are compelled to embrace responsibility initiatives, minimize negative environmental impacts in all facets of their operations and comply with environmental laws ... all while increasing profits.

As a result, an emerging "green" software market is giving rise to tools for managing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and industrial pollution, air and water consumption, paper waste, energy conservation and regulatory compliance requirements. Companies are looking for sustainability solutions in satellite data crunching programs, simulation software for devising improved materials and processes, and in-field decision support applications. Green tools range all the way from computer-aided design packages that reduce the amounts of construction raw materials needed while improving energy efficiency in finished buildings, to software for controlling and reducing per-sheet paper output on office multifunction peripheral (MFP) devices -- printers/copiers/scanners/faxes -- used in those buildings.

Carbon Emissions Central
The beating heart of the sustainability software market is carbon emissions accounting -- measurement of the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) that will not be released into the atmosphere as a result of mitigation efforts and offsets. Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA) software includes tools for carbon uptake monitoring, carbon management self assessment for measuring company offsets, and analysis of energy planning and GHG mitigation.

"Carbon auditing is a hot spot in the software and services market at the moment," Stephen Stokes, an analyst at tech industry consultant AMR Research, told TechNewsWorld. AMR estimates that the market for software and consulting services that let companies collect and report data about carbon emissions has already reached US$3.6 billion.

Moreover, the global market for carbon accounting, collecting data and consulting services is expected to reach $7 billion to $9 billion in two to three years, according to "Enterprise Carbon Accounting: An Analysis of Organizational-Level GHG Reporting and a Review of Emerging GHG Software Products," a June 2009 report released by Groom Energy Solutions.

The ECA market has been validated with the 2009 entry of software giants Computer Associates and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), as well as SAP's (NYSE: SAP) purchase of two-year-old start-up Clear Standards, the Groom Energy report states. The report identified the seven current market leaders as determined by number of customer deployments, technology features, market vision and financial stability: Enviance, ESS, IHS, Johnson Controls, PE International, ProcessMAP and SAP/Clear Standards.

The biggest issue for any software that purports to enable sustainability is that it must be verifiable and auditable, said Larry Goldenhersh, CEO of Carlsbad, Calif.-based Enviance, a provider of Internet-based, on-demand systems for the automation of environmental, health and safety (EHS) compliance activities and GHG tracking and reduction management

"Because carbon data, for example, is not financial data and not a matter of zeros and ones, customers need to trust that the solutions they have in place will be defensible on many levels -- regulatory and reputational," Goldenhersh told TechNewsWorld. "Organizations looking to purchase a sustainability software platform need to choose one that has proven results, is built by environmental domain experts and grounded in the physics and chemistry of compliance -- especially when it comes to greenhouse gas."