This morning Green Wombat spoke to a CEO whose startup tech company’s
revenues have shot up from $400,000 to $4 million in two years. Verdiem
isn’t about Web 2.0, it doesn’t do online video or mobile
social networking for Generation Z. It makes software that – wait for
it – manages corporate personal computer networks to lower energy usage. Sounds as sexy as, oh, selling CRM or SQL server database
software, right? But to companies looking to save money and enhance their enviro cred
as global warming concerns escalate, Verdiem’s software is a justifiable buy, and the 25-person Seattle startup has carved out a high-growth niche as Big Business goes green. "The whole ethos of integrating an environmental or sustainability strategy as a corporate objective is the single biggest change we’ve seen over the past year," says Verdiem chief executive Kevin Klustner.
Verdiem began selling its Surveyor
software in 2004 to school districts and other public institutions and
non-profts that need to keep costs under control. "But we saw very
little interest on the corporate side," Klustner says. "We save energy
on a PC network. The IT guys are the ones that manage the network and
they don’t pay the energy bill." But with more and more Fortune 500
companies appointing VPs for sustainability and environmental policy,
demand for Verdiem’s software has grown, according to Klustner. He says corporate clients – currently about 15 percent of Verdiem’s customer base – include Quad/Graphics, the big Wisconsin printing company, and several Wall Street firms he said did not want to be identified at this time. Verdiem sells seat licenses to the software and charges a yearly maintenance fee, which includes updates and an annual energy audit. That gives customers hard data on how much money they’re saving by lowering electricty usage – a figure that can be translated into how many fewer tons of greenhouse gases they’re emitting. Verdiem has also cut deals with 25 utilities that will rebate part of the seat license if companies can show they’ve lowered electricity use.
A running tally on Verdiem’s site, for instance, trumpets that its clients have saved nearly $18 million and cut their greenhouse gas emissions by about 146,000 tons – the equivalent of taking 19,000 cars off the road. Such numbers give companies green bragging rights, of course, but also could potentially prove valuable as limits on greenhouse gases are imposed and carbon trading markets emerge in states like California.
Surveyor allows IT administrators to centrally manage PC power usage, putting the computers to sleep or turning them off according to employees’ work patterns. The company has sold more than 300,000 licenses and Verdiem says clients can cut energy use by five to 15 percent. It projects one client, the City University of New York, will save more than $1 million over four years.
Klustner, a software industry veteran, says VC-funded Verdiem will focus on the corporate market in 2007 and plans to expand internationally. "It’s energizing and inspiring to be in software business, which I know about, but with a product that has a benefit for the greater good."
Green Wombat 
Nice post. The success of companies like Verdiem show a growing realization of the benefits of reducing wasteful energy usage practices. I like how their software takes the burden of responsibility away from the individual employees and puts it squarely on the shoulders of the client company itself — it is a collective problem that is best solved with a centralized solution.
Can’t you just shut down your computer and turn off the monitor before you leave? Won’t you save more energy that way?
gee, i thought this was already included in the computer under the “power consumption” part of the screen saver. Maybe I can spend some money having someone turn my car off everytime I get out of it. This is absolutely retarded that someone would pay to turn off a computer.
I just thought that you might like to know that your blog has found its way to my site. http://www.feedthebull.com/story.php?title=Verdiem-EnergySaving-Software-Sales-Boom-as-Corporate-America-Goes-Green
I really enjoyed the article, keep them coming. Feel free to post them on my site as well. We always give a link back to the original article, so it will increase traffic on your end. It would be great to have other people see your writings.
http://www.feedthebull.com/register.php
I am not sure how many of you people who are criticizing have been to office buildings or libraries at 2 in the morning. Believe it or not poeple do not turn of their computers when they leave. And its just not computers, I hope you can look at the bigger picture. For example libraries with multiple floors can lower heating at some levels that are not used at all at certain time of nights. Just reducing floor heat temperature from 75 to 65 for whole floor for 6 months for 7-8 hours everyday, I guess it will reduce some electricity bills.
When you leave for work shut off your heat at your apartment and you will see the difference end of the month (when you pay electricity bill). Now imagine that for buildings that are big. My heating bills use to be 60$ a month when i dont use to shut of my heat. Now it has gone down to 25$ as I turn it on when I come back home. Offcourse I am at my place for only 8 hours a day, so I think I can manage without heat other 16 hours.
I think this is fantastic. This is how a free market should work. Now if the government could jsut give it that last little nudge and make corporations have this technology in place withint two years or so, our dependence on foreign oil would drop trememndously helping everyone out. Gas would fall, heating bills would fall and OPEC would be knocking at OUR door askign how they can help us defeat terrorism. If this saves companies 5-15% on energy, that alone would translate to a much cleaner environment.Add in all the other initiatives currently taking place and once again America the Beautiful becomes a world leader fot the next generation. We would be so much more competitive with the extra resources and money corporations can save. I love it.
Ok, I don’t understand how you can praise free markets and then turn around and say that government should mandate this service??? I think it’s great that this kind of service is catching on, but it will do so because the companies that use it become more profitable, and competitive and the ones that don’t die off. It’s called creative destruction, or survival of the fittest.
Energy savings aside, having an automatic shutdown prevents unauthorized staff like janitorial night crews from accessing personal or classified documents or perhaps sending a crank e-mail from staff that has not logged off. Also, a scheduled shutdown forces the reboot that some automatic software updates require to complete the install.
I agree with the idiocracy of this and like the example of someone turning off the car for me. Isn’t it just as easy to put the computer in shut-down mode after 30 minutes of non-use? Why pay for something that can and should be configured correctly by IT? To me it’s just another get rich scheme on something consumers should be able to do themselves (can I pay now to have someone take out my garbage?) By the way, running this software kept my cd running constantly and this software at 99% in my task manager which makes me wonder what things in my computer are working harder/running more often to keep this software running? If you’re constantly reading/writing to the hard-drive/cd rom/cpu, doesn’t that produce some wear and tear on them (or does that not make sense to anyone)? I turned this product off because I got sick and tired of hearing my cd rom constantly running.
There’s a sucker every day who’s willing to pay for something which they don’t understand how to easily do themselves! Now if only I could think of an easy way to get rich on the consumer’s behalf and lack of knowledge.
As someone who manages a desktop environment of over 8,000 pc’s power management with native windows settings is a management nightmare. Leaving it up to the individual user for large companies is a failing proposition. We pay our IT alot of money, having and FTE spend their time tinkering with individuals power settings is a completely ineffecient use of IT resources. You can have policies in place but unless you have enforcement and verification it’s a wasted exercise. Centralized power management does have value for larger enterprises.