Carbon Accounting Software: The next huge thing

Great blog post today from Tom Raftery: Carbon accounting software – a huge opportunity? Seems like I am not the only one that thinks green tape is going to be a major issue. One way to calculate Bit Miles is with carbon accounting software, and you can be sure we’re going to see Carbon Added tax. Taxes aside, carbon trading is set to be a big deal. And how can we manage what we can’t measure, if we want to move towards carbon neutrality?

The post is based on a ComputerWorld story, which is based on some new research from S2 Intelligence (a firm I am sure we’ll hear a lot more from).

S2’s managing director, Dr Bruce McCabe, said

to reduce the carbon footprint of businesses we first need to measure it, but green accounting today is shallow, with lots of window dressing and little actual measurement… Even services companies will see all their offices progressively instrumented to capture carbon footprint data

Government regulation–via carbon markets and taxation-will be matched by customer and trading partner demands for detailed reporting.

Carbon labelling in supermarkets is a good example. Led by chains such as Tesco in the UK, this will soon impact what makes it into the shopping basket.

BT is already aggressively positioning itself for the measurement wave in this space. Indeed Tesco is a customer of the telco’s services arm. It looks like SAP and Technidata get their second mention of the day on GreenMonk: they also offer carbon accounting solutions. SAP should really buy Technidata so that it can move forward more quickly in this space. Microsoft is also likely to play aggressively in environmental monitoring. It just announced some cool sounding embedded sensors. The big 4 are all bound to be involved. Do you know of any smaller players in the space?