What’s inside CA’s ecoSoftware

Despite the general disappointment that was COP15, companies around the world are increasingly faced with the challenges to calculating and reporting their carbon emissions and managing their sustainability initiatives for a variety of reasons.

The task can be monumental in scale, especially for organisations that operate across different borders, facing different sets of regulatory requirements. Worst yet, there’s no systematic methodology for doing it. That challenge is being tackled by CA, formerly Computer Associates, who launched its ecoSoftware package late last year to help companies and organisations do just that.

Green Telecom Live spoke recently to Peter Gilbert, VP of CA ecoSoftware, about the solution, its various components and methodologies, how it works and why organisations need to adopt such a solution.

In a nutshell, ecoSoftware consists essentially of four main components – operational energy management, carbon account and carbon management, sustainability management, and environmental assessment. Each component is designed to address specific challenges that organisations face when kick starting their sustainability initiative. As a whole, ecoSoftware helps organisations in developing a systematic approach to evaluate, control, and report on their energy, carbon emissions, align their corporate strategy around key objectives, and gauge and track their progress in meeting those goals.

Excerpt of the interview:

Green Telecom Live: What is the origin of ecoSoftware? Is this a brand new solution, or is it an amalgamation of things that you are doing for customers and then packaged in a way to address sustainability?

Peter Gilbert: It really came originally out of our corporate strategy process. So CA, we have a corporate strategy process and that process is intended to find areas of opportunities for the company in areas or markets that are adjacent to our core software markets. That process identified two areas in which we started some research projects. Those two areas were: Operational energy management – basically helping organisations with really managing, the operational details of managing energy within their organisation; and carbon management and carbon trading. What happened was, we did the analysis and did the research and what we did was take some of our strongest technology assets, some of our strongest technology capabilities, and innovated on top of those and implemented software in-house, which had been addressing some of the challenges associated with energy and sustainability – we use it in-house internally and we had something that worked well for us. We realised we had solutions that were relevant to our customers as well, so we saw there was potential to bringing this to market.

What we did was, we continued our innovation process and we brought the ecoSoftware solution to the market.

The entire interview with Peter Gilbert, plus our analysis on ecoSoftware, is now available to subscribers of the Green Telecom Live newsletter. Subscribe NOW and put in ecoSoftware in the ‘comments’ box to receive the full document.

Related posts:

1. TESCO taps CA’s ecoSoftware to reduce carbon footprint
2. CA launches ecoSoftware
3. Inside GSMA’s Green Manifesto – Four Part report

Tags: CA, carbon accounting, carbon management software, carbon regulation, carbon risk, Climate change, ecoSoftware, energy efficiency, energy management, environmental assessment

Category: Applications, Climate change, Featured articles, Green corporations, Green ICT