CloudApps: A holistic view of carbon
Published Thursday, 28th October 2010
More businesses are trying to cut their carbon emissions, whether it’s to meet the requirements of legislation like the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), reduce energy costs or keep green-minded customers happy. Most of these companies, though, tackle the challenge with a top-down approach, assigning a sustainability officer to head up their eco-efforts.
But what if firms aimed to hit their carbon goals using Facebook-style tools that let everyone in the organisation get involved? Wouldn’t that encourage employees across the board to actively engage in the effort and maybe even generate some clever crowd-sourced strategies that the execs at the top might not have thought of?
That’s exactly what the people behind a young firm called CloudApps figured. Launched just this year, the UK-based startup has well-seasoned cleantech veterans at the helm, including founder Steve Garnett and deputy chairman Stephen Kelly. Garnett and Kelly worked together at Oracle more than 20 years ago and have now reunited with the goal of helping companies become more energy efficient and sustainable.
“We just saw a huge gap in the marketplace,” Kelly says. “To be successful in sustainability, you have to take a holistic view.”
That means helping not only top executives, but everyone in an organisation, see and understand how their actions and decisions affect a company’s carbon emissions and environmental performance. And that’s what CloudApps does, offering a real-time, cloud-based suite of tools that measure impacts, generate reports for a variety of purposes, track and manage progress and engage employees, customers, supply-chain partners and others throughout the process. The built-in social networking applications are designed to let the best ideas bubble up to the top, allowing companies to “implement programmes that are well thought-out and have the grassroots support necessary for success,” according to CloudApps.
“We find employee engagement really interesting,” Kelly says. “It’s a whole different strategy … We’re pioneering in this area. Employee engagement makes sure the rubber is hitting the road.”
Despite CloudApps’ short history, it’s already won some significant customers, including its latest and largest-yet: Veolia Environmental Services, the UK’s top recycling and waste management company. Veolia, which employs some 12,000 people, aims to use CloudApps’ carbon management suite to help it comply with the CRC and save money through energy efficiency.
“Monitoring and proactively managing our carbon footprint is an integral part of our corporate responsibility strategy,” says Simone Looi, environmental manager at Veolia. “We plan to use our knowledge and experience of this application to help our employees, customers and partners to continually reduce their impact on the environment wherever possible.”
Before the year is out, CloudApps also has its eyes set on entering the US market, Kelly says. With the ability to roll out a new company deployment in just 15 to 20 days, CloudApps is clearly on the sustainability sector’s fast track.
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