Verdiem

Doing Well by Doing Good

Verdiem and its customers see revenues and cost savings from “green” technology.
by Mark Levenson

James Tatham, in Portland, Oregon, was wrong, and that’s why the City University of New York is saving U.S.$600,000 a year—and helping to save the environment, as well.

There’s a bit more to the story than that, of course. The year was 2000 and Tatham was a technology executive in Portland. His wife, Cindy, worked for the government in nearby Washington County, home to such corporate giants as Intel and Nike. Oregon’s governor had challenged counties throughout the state to reduce their energy consumption, Washington County was trying to oblige, and Cindy Tatham was the county’s point-person for the project.

Cindy Tatham had noticed that the county, like most organizations, left its PCs on after employees had left for the evening. While there might be ways to save larger sums of money—such as new heating and air conditioning, or lighting systems—it seemed to her there could hardly be an easier, faster, way to save money than by turning off those PCs when they weren’t needed.

Was there a software product designed to do that, she asked her husband? James Tatham gave the obvious answer: for such a simple and universal issue, there had to be an available solution.

But there was one problem with Tatham’s answer: it was wrong. Sure, screen-savers could turn off displays (although sometimes these solutions consumed more energy than they saved), and individual PCs could go into sleep mode, but, amazingly, there was no solution for an organization or company seeking to manage the energy consumption of its hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of PCs.
 
At least, not yet.

The last six months have seen a titanic shift in the marketplace. I’ve never been involved in a market that has shifted so quickly. Kevin Klustner Chief Executive Officer, Verdiem

Within the year, Tatham had helped to found a company—Verdiem—to develop and market that solution, called SURVEYORTM. The solution works by enabling organizations to control the power settings of PCs and their displays over the network, from a central location. The software also allows customizable settings—for example, turning PCs off in an office that shuts down at 6pm, but leaving them on until 10pm in a department that stays open into the evening, or by turning half of an office’s PCs off at 5pm, and another 25 percent off two hours later. The solution also collects and stores energy-consumption data for the PCs and displays that it monitors.

Tatham, now Vice President for Services at Verdiem, knew that he and his colleagues were ahead of the market but he was also convinced that the market would catch up to them. He had a few years to wait.

A typical PC uses $45 to $120 per year in electricity, depending on utility rates, and a company can save one-third or more of those costs by putting PCs into low-energy mode when users are at lunch, in meetings, or gone for the day.

That’s real money, to be sure, especially for larger organizations and companies with thousands of PCs. But those organizations and companies weren’t beating a path to Verdiem’s door.

Now, they are.

“The last six months have seen a titanic shift in the marketplace,” says Kevin Klustner, Chief Executive Officer of Verdiem. “I’ve never been involved in a market that has shifted so quickly.”

The difference, according to Klustner, is that organizations with large numbers of PCs have discovered that much more than saving money is at stake from reducing the electricity wasted on idling machines—saving the environment is at stake, as well.

The average PC and display consume 600 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year, resulting in between 710 and 1,330 pounds of carbon dioxide being sent into the atmosphere. For a 5,000-PC network, that comes to 6.7 million pounds of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere each year—as much carbon dioxide as is produced by 475 midsized cars. Worse, according to the Department of Energy, up to two-thirds of that amount is a complete waste because most PCs are run at full power even when no one is sitting in front of them.

“Organizations and companies have been aware of the environmental impact of their energy use for some time, of course,” says Klustner. “But we’ve now reached the point where they realize the ‘green’ movement isn’t a fad. Their customers and even their employees are now requiring them to be environmentally responsible. And they’re responding with directives that affect all areas of operation, including IT. The goal isn’t just to be more efficient or to reduce costs. The goal is to help reverse global warming and the destruction of the atmosphere.”

One of the organizations that is acting on this goal is the City University of New York (CUNY). With more than 25,000 PCs located across its 19 campuses throughout New York City, CUNY has been committed to energy reduction for more than a decade. When New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg recently unveiled the city’s energy reduction targets for the year 2030, CUNY and nine other area universities voiced their support by going the mayor one better, pledging to do their parts to reach those targets by 2017.

“There’s only one way we’re going to reach our goal of energy reduction,” says Ron Spalter, Deputy Chief Operating Officer, CUNY. “That’s through solutions such as SURVEYOR. Deploying the solution was an early and easy win for us—the type of win that’s immediately visible to our students and faculty, and that shows we’re serious about reduced energy consumption.”

After piloting SURVEYOR on two of its campuses in 2005, CUNY quickly deployed the software to 16 campuses in 2006, with the goal of having the entire university system on it by the end of this year. CUNY is a highly decentralized organization, so SURVEYOR’s flexibility suits the university’s operations. Network administrators at each campus deploy the client software on their PCs, then set policies for the use of those PCs from a central application housed in their IT departments. They can change shut-down policies based on the time of day or day of the week, and change the policies further to reflect university holidays—or keep the PCs powered during those holidays, if they anticipate their continued use.

Spalter and his colleagues anticipated SURVEYOR would achieve a payback in three years, far faster than the 10 years that’s typical for large-scale energy conservation projects. But the solution exceeded CUNY’s expectations, achieving payback in just 18 months. The university estimates it will save $3 million and eliminate 23,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions over five years.

And CUNY’s biggest benefits from SURVEYOR may be still to come. Spalter and University Energy Coordinator Art Fasolino are now exploring the use of the solution to control other, larger consumers of electricity, such as the university’s pervasive population of aging air conditioner window units.

Nor is CUNY alone in appreciating the benefits of SURVEYOR. Verdiem has seen its customer base soar more than 400 percent in the past two years. The solution now monitors and controls the energy use of more than 400,000 PCs worldwide saving their owners more than $32 million, and saving the environment from 276,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions—the equivalent of taking 34,000 cars off the road.

There’s only one way we’re going to reach our goal of energy reduction. That’s through solutions such as SURVEYOR. Ron Spalter Deputy Chief Operating Officer, City University of New York

Beyond the rapidly growing interest in green technology, the solution is finding rapid market acceptance because of the technology on which it’s based, according to Bruce Twito, Chief Technology Officer, Verdiem.

“We built SURVEYOR using the latest Microsoft® technologies,” says Twito. “That was a deliberate decision to use the technologies that our customers and potential customers already own, understand, and use. They can deploy our solution using the same Microsoft technologies they already use for remote, automated software deployment. They can use the same operating system and database technologies with which their people are already trained and familiar—and for which they already own the requisite licenses. That makes the solution as fast, easy, and cost-effective to deploy and maintain as possible.”

Klustner and Twito say the market for SURVEYOR can only grow. Verdiem now has partnership agreements with more than 25 energy utilities around the country that grant rebates to corporate and organizational customers that use the solution.

Utilities are increasingly interested in products like SURVEYOR in anticipation of the market for trading carbon credits and the ability to earn revenue in that market from SURVEYOR-based energy savings.

“We’ve come a very long way in a very short time,” says Tatham. “People in large corporate settings now understand the crucial importance of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Thankfully, there are some very easy things they can do to act on that understanding—such as using SURVEYOR. Do you know how great it is to get up every morning and know that you’re part of the solution?” 

Under the Hood

Verdiem SURVEYOR runs on Microsoft server technologies including Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, an integral component of the Windows® operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications. A single SURVEYOR server can monitor and control up to 50,000 PCs, and the solution scales out with additional servers to support larger deployments.

On the client side, the software supports all Windows desktop operating systems from Windows 95 through the Windows Vista™ operating system. The SURVEYOR client software, installed on every PC to be monitored and controlled by SURVEYOR, initiates communications with the SURVEYOR server application, “checking In” with the server component for updates to power-setting profiles, and to upload power-state and energy-consumption data. Clients can communicate with the server at any interval the IT administrator chooses.

 

Learn more about Verdiem at:
www.verdiem.com

Learn more about Microsoft resources for ISVs at:
www.microsoft.com/isv