Energy consultancy claims edge with carbon management software

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The enterprise carbon accounting software market is populated both by software pure plays and by consulting firms that have developed solutions for clients. And while experts say that much of the carbon accounting solutions that energy and sustainability consultancies have put together for clients have come in the form of customized spreadsheets, it’s incorrect to assume that all consulting firms are limited to customized spreadsheets for their carbon accounting solutions.

This realization became clear to me after interviewing some folks from Pace Global Energy Services, a Fairfax, Va.-based energy advisory and services firm that also offers software solutions for energy and carbon management. Earlier this week, I interviewed Kyle Smith, managing director, and Sean Metivier, product manager for the firm’s “Ecolink” carbon management solution. Far from being a spreadsheet template, Ecolink is a database-driven, Web-based carbon management solution that Pace Global offers under a hosted model. What’s more, say Smith and Metivier, it builds on 15 years experience in offering its energy management software solutions to clients in sectors including industrial.

Ecolink has been on the market for a year and half, but builds on a15-year history Pace Global has with its EnergyZone energy management software, which is usually deployed along side Ecolink. When you combine the number of customer sites using Ecolink and Energy Zone, says Smith, there are about 9,000 sites using the software. One client has Ecolink deployed across 75 sites, but others use it for as few as three sites.

The Web-based Ecolink offers a dashboard with geographic maps with drill-down capability into local carbon details, as well as dials that show carbon emissions, energy, and sustainability project progress. The system also offers reports and analytics, which among other things, allows users to compare carbon trends to production trends such as production output. ”Ecolink is a true enterprise software system with a database and a security-enabled, Web UI,” says Smith.

According to Metivier, Pace Global’s developers used a Microsoft .NET architecture to develop Ecolink, which on Pace’s back end hosting site, runs on a SQL Server database. Though hosted, users own their data, and typically upload baseline data into the system to establish reference trends. Users also can export data to tools such as Excel.

I got the chance to take a quick demo of the software, and it’s indeed an enterprise-class solution, with configurable analytics and reports that can be set up by business users, in addition to the graphical Web-based dashboard. Clearly, it’s way beyond being a customized solution built around a spreadsheet, which according to research from Groom Energy Solutions I recently blogged about, is how about 90 percent of the 3,000 or so carbon accounting software projects around the world so far can be characterized.

One thing I wonder, however, is whether the carbon management/accounting software market will go the way that most other categories of enterprise software have, and end up being dominated by pure-play software vendors, rather than consulting firms or other types of vendors, such as providers of building automation systems. After all, decades ago during the early days of the enterprise resources planning (ERP) market (then called manufacturing resources planning) , the players included IBM, which which saw ERP as a catalyst for its mainframe and mid-range computer business, and Andersen Consulting (the forerunner of Accenture), which dabbled in software offerings during the early days of the ERP market before hitching its wagon as an implementer to the rising software pure plays. The ERP software market steadily went the way of the software pure plays, some of which became quite large, most notably SAP.

But is carbon management software a different sort of market, requiring a level of content expertise that makes it more akin to plant management software, where large industrial automation vendors remain dominant software players as well? Maybe so. According to the guys from Pace Global, energy and emissions expertise is crucial to setting up a carbon management solution correctly, and keeping it integrated with energy management data and trends. “The linch pin is how you provide auditable data to feed the system,” says Smith. “Other vendors–the software pure plays, would say that’s where the client comes in. But 80 percent of the work is defining the data, establishing who is accountable for it, and developing a means to push it through a system in audited and accountable manner.”