Joulex strives to keep network power management simple

The whole power management utility software space sort of reminds me of the days when security was considered really separately of the network. So perhaps it isn't surprising that high-tech security entrepreneur, Tom Noonan, co-founder of Internet Security Systems (which as acquired by IBM for $1.5 billion) has opted to return to the industry at the helm of power management policy company Joulex.

The company has closely married the principles of network management with power management: basically, if it's on the network the Joulex Energy Manager software can turn it off. That includes everything -- IP phones, servers, routers, hubs and such.

Noonan says that the policy engine in Joulex helps companies analyze energy consumption and then act to reduce it, in turn reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. These policies can help save between 40 percent and 60 percent of the IP device power consumption in your organization, he estimates.

"We believe in the fact that conservation is the biggest reservoir of energy out there," Noonan says.

Joulex's big claim is that its agentless technology affects the network as little as possible, deploying quickly on a single Windows server and requiring about 4 gigabytes of RAM. In many cases, he says the software shows a return on investment in fewer than six months. It works across all manner of client devices, including Macintosh computers and virtual machines. The pricing winds up being about 30 percent of the potential money that a given enterprise might expect to save on their electricity bill by deploying the software, Noonan says.

Jeff Roman, vice president of the information services group at Interface Global, the Atlanta-based carpet and flooring company that has made sustainability principles core to its operating procedures, says his organization is always seeking technologies to help advance that mission. When I spoke with Roman a few weeks back, the Interface IT organization was testing the Joulex software on phones and desktops in order to building the cost-justification case before rolling it out to all 4,000 employees.

The fact that the software is agentless was particularly attractive, as was the fact that the implementation was relatively easy, he says. "We're still in the early phases of cost-justifying, but we are seeing savings from the time we switched it on and started applying the rules," Roman says.