Report: Sales boom coming for energy and carbon management software
Groom Energy's latest report on the state of the carbon and energy management software marketplace suggests that sales leapt more than 400 percent in 2010, spurred by big-company purchases by the likes of Bayer, R.J. Reynolds, Safeway and Wyndham Hotels.
"The 2011 Enterprise Energy and Carbon Accounting (EECA) Software Market -- A Buyer's Guide," also predicts growth of 300 percent over the next 12 months. Says the report's author, Groom's vice president of sustainability services, Paul Baier:
"During the past year, we've seen strong adoption of EECA solutions by large corporations with several leading vendors beginning to break away from the rest of the providers. Reflecting the market maturity, there were fewer venture capital investments and limited M&A activity as compared to previous years. With the new demand for energy consumption reporting along with carbon management, the vendor landscape has expanded and now comprises the EHS software providers, energy management firms and well-capitalized specialist firms."
As I've suggested a number of times, this is a category ripe for consolidation, especially as established enterprise resource planning software vendors like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft look toward this new category aspirationally. Some of the players to watch, according to Groom Energy's report, are Advantage IQ, Enablon, EnerNOC, Enviance, Hara, IHS, Johnson Controls, PE International, SAP and Summit Energy. In all, the report covers 75 of the software vendors angling for a piece of this market.
Based on other activity that I've seen, I think you'll see many of these companies and others ally themselves with the big technology services firms. One example is the deal announced this week by CA Technologies and Capgemini, which will see the latter create a sustainability data collection service based on CA's ecoSoftware application.
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