CA Inc has launched into the carbon management software sector with an application to support enterprise wide energy-efficiency drives and corporate sustainability initiatives.

The new ecoSoftware has been developed internally and draws together CA know-how in the areas of network monitoring, project and portfolio management and governance, Terrence Clark, Senior VP and General Manager at CA told us.

Clark explained the company had built the application to support the four inter-linked aspects of sustainability management, carbon management, environmental assessments and operational energy management.

The product will address end-to-end management of a corporation’s sustainability management programme, from definition to execution he said.

“It captures the best key performance indicators and helps management decide on the best path for a programme, whether that be in the context of cost-benefit analysis, carbon emissions or energy reduction.”

Collectively the modules support the processes that are needed to identify carbon sources across the enterprise and then to gather data on emissions that stem from electricity, heating, refrigeration and so on.

The application will support carbon assessments of all aspects of a business covering its facilities, the data centre and out across its supply chain.

There are also ecoMeter features and capabilities so that any IP addressable device could be monitored. 

That system provides a broad range of device and interface support, status monitoring, alarms and hot spot notifications. The objective is to work to reduce operational energy costs by monitoring devices to discover sub-optimal equipment and operations.

Various analytics, reports and dashboards can be produced for the relevant business managers, which could also be used to display energy consumption and power billing patterns.

CA reckons CRC affects 20,000 non-energy organisations – most all of which lack any visibility into their energy consumption. 

“IT is part of the problem,” Clark said, “with an estimated 2% of the world’s emissions said to be somehow IT related. But we believe also that IT has a great opportunity to play a strategic role in addressing the challenges and be a real contributor towards carbon reduction.”

CA said that the UK retailer of Tesco is among the first users of the carbon software. 

Based on ambitious targets announced in 2007 using 2006 as a baseline, Tesco plans to halve emissions from existing buildings by 2020, halve distribution emissions of each case of goods delivered by 2012, and halve emissions from new stores by 2020. 

The company claims already to have halved its energy use per square foot in its UK stores.