IBM business partner develops greenhouse meter

One of the toughest things about being a technology VAR or reseller is finding a way to "productize" your intellectual property. Otherwise, your tech guys find themselves building custom solutions for virtually every customer. Not so for Enterprise Information Management (EIM), a small IBM Business Partner that has struck green with a new offering called GreenCert.

Based on IBM's Websphere portal software technology, GreenCert is being positioned as a way to automate the collection and documentation of corporate greenhouse gas management efforts. The data can be turned into Certified Carbon Emissions Reduction Credits that in turn can be used on the global greenhouse gas reduction trading market. Which, in turn, could turn a company's green efforts into a potential revenue source.

GreenCert was actually created through a collaboration of EIM and two related companies called Evergreen Energy and C-Lock Technology, which provides the patent-pending technology that crunches all the numbers to produce the greenhouse numbers. Other software driving the application include all sorts of stuff from IBM: Websphere Portal, Lotus Forms, DB2 Universal Database, DB2 Content Manager and DB2 Records Manager.

The GreenCert product will actually be sold by C-Lock, starting in the first half of next year. The companies haven't released any sort of pricing yet. (But you could imagine from the software involved, that the pricetag will be rather dear.) In theory, you can find a trial beta at the C-Lock Web site but I wasn't able to locate it this morning.

Target deployment locations for GreenCert include power plants, cement factories, steel factories and even commercial buildings. It can be customized for the industry that intends to use it.