We anticipate that 2011 will be a dynamic year in the development of technologies and services that enable organizations to improve agility and business performance by pursuing sustainability strategies. We highlight five vendors with value propositions that blur and expand boundaries.

• Sustainable software, systems and services have continued to diversify and expand during the past 12 months.

• There has been a shift away from tools that singularly consider the reporting or analysis of carbon toward technologies that visualize and more efficiently manage energy, and provide more holistic analysis of sustainable performance and asset management.

• Sustainable technologies and applications are starting to be incorporated into core business functions, rather than being treated in independent silos. We anticipate that 2011 will be a critical year for many niche and "startup" vendors in the sustainability business system ecosystem. Mergers, acquisitions and partnerships will abound, and many vendors will be searching for the "killer" functionality in which to invest their dwindling funds.

• Enterprises should work with their landlords as appropriate to exploit a variety of technologies and to improve their energy efficiency and utilization.

• Midsize to large organizations should be developing a more integrated approach to energy management across all major energy-consuming classes of assets. Enterprises must develop an integrated set of tools to create an IT platform for sustainable business. Broad-based solutions, such as the one from The Continuum Network, which have the support of subject matter experts, go a long way toward helping organizations achieve this.

• Organizations interested in the energy and carbon associated with the IT services should look to the level of transparency and the efforts made to reduce carbon emissions being set by GreenQloud.

• Asset-intensive enterprises need to focus on optimization of performance over the full life cycle of assets. Tools such as those provided by Remsoft turn conventional enterprise asset management into sustainable and dynamic asset insights.

This document was revised on 19 April 2011. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Sustainability continues to evolve at a brisk pace. Although the primary emphasis on carbon has diminished as the threat of regulation has retreated for the moment in most geographies, we have seen an increased focus on energy efficiency. Many forward-thinking organizations have taken significant steps in analyzing and managing the sustainability-related performance aspects of their business and supply chains.

We anticipate that 2011 will be an exciting year in the sustainability technology space, with lots of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships. Most vendors will face hard choices regarding which "killer" functionality they'll need to invest their limited development resources in. We also anticipate further broadening of the spectrum of physical and information technologies relating to sustainability, and their increased integration with "smart" subsystems within buildings, manufacturing processes and elsewhere.

The five vendors we have chosen are united by their ability to improve the operational efficiency of organizations, which they do by targeting different contemporary aspects of sustainable performance. They, too, will face some tough choices this year.

The energy efficiency of buildings, the assets within them, the building subsystem infrastructures — such as heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) — and the lighting infrastructure are critical areas for organizations or business units that are accountable for their associated electricity bills, as they can realize significant savings. Last year, we examined an intelligent lighting system; this year, we highlight Aircuity, a provider of technology that enables much more intelligent HVAC systems. We also look at JouleX, which provides an energy management system targeting Internet Protocol (IP)-connected devices, and also leverages existing investment-associated management platforms.

As scrutiny of sustainability performance increases to include customers, investors and employees, enterprises need to better understand the value achievable from sustainable actions, strategies and investments. We review an application designed by sustainability subject matter experts that is distinguished by its pedigree and completeness of vision.

With the emphasis on real-time analytics and modeling to aid "sustainability informed" decision making, it's easy to lose sight of some available operational capabilities that are more prosaic and frequently undervalued. To correct this imbalance, we look at Remsoft, which is offering an interesting take on long-term asset management.

Finally, what Cool Vendors report on green IT and sustainability would be complete without a cloud services vendor? Unlike most cloud providers that are purposely unclear about their impact, energy efficiency and carbon density, GreenQloud is not. This vendor, like the others, is leveraging the inherent potential efficiencies of the cloud architecture and business model, but is trying to minimize carbon emissions all the way to the client, and will tell any interested client how much energy they've consumed.

Newton, Massachusetts (www.aircuity.com)

Analysis by Stephen Stokes

Why Cool: There is something very uncool about the way we continue to heat and ventilate our buildings. Approximately 33% of all building energy consumption is related to HVAC. In many developed economies, buildings represent the single largest category of energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite being such a Pareto-significant contributor to GHG emissions, intelligent fresh air ventilation has taken a backseat in comparison to imperatives focused on advanced metering to improve energy load/supply information, variable-speed motors, efficient lighting and other building subsystems.

Conventional HVAC systems typically incorporate a small number of relatively inaccurate, single-parameter sensors that are infrequently calibrated, are rarely connected to an information technology system, and result in substantial waste of energy due to overventilation. During the past 10 years, and accelerating considerably following a 2008 injection of capital investment, Aircuity has sought to transform ventilation in a variety of large commercial building applications. The company's approach has been to integrate accurate, multiparameter sensors with data storage systems to create high-efficiency intelligent ventilation. Aircuity's approach allows measured and verified energy savings, real-time diagnostic information, and actionable performance data that can be directly fed into optimization strategies for building performance. Its multiparameter strategy means that, in addition to simply measuring temperature, numerous other factors relevant to general or specialized building environments (e.g., clean room or containment/isolation areas) can be collected, analyzed, and leveraged to maximize the personal working environment and its energy performance. These parameters can include humidity, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels, volatile organic compounds and particulate materials, depending on the nature of the sensors that are hung from the system.

A great deal of the focus on green buildings has rightly been directed toward the design phase, where the essential performance envelope is established. Aircuity is changing the way people think about the actual occupation and functional performance of building ventilation subsystems throughout their use phase. Case example data from installations of Aircuity's OptiNet product has demonstrated the capability to deliver annual savings of more than $1 million.

Challenges: Like so many other startup or early-phase businesses, Aircuity has substantial challenges in scaling to fully support the potential market opportunity for intelligent building ventilation offers. While building information management systems remain a somewhat nascent market, the emphasis remains focused on strategies for efficient lighting— rather than efficient and intelligent cooling — of the built environment. As the market evolves and the notion of a smart, information-enabled built environment develops, it seems highly likely that Aircuity will play an important role in keeping buildings efficiently and intelligently "cool."

Who Should Care: Aircuity should interest energy or building and facilities management specialists looking for a solution that tracks, communicates and optimizes building performance. The solution delivers key information and enables process improvement and usage visibility. Cost savings from reduced energy consumption can be readily demonstrated and quantified, and, in many applications, would appear to significantly outweigh system costs on subannual time scales.

Reykjavik, Iceland (www.greenqloud.com)

Analysis by Milind Govekar and Simon Mingay

Why Cool: In a soon to be extended beta test, GreenQloud will offer infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services that are compatible with Amazon's application programming interface (API), operating from data centers in Iceland using a 40 Gbps InifiniBand-based high-performance computing (HPC) environment. GreenQloud is interesting in that it has put sustainability and low-carbon services at the heart of its brand, value proposition and operations, leveraging Iceland's inexpensive hydro- and geothermal-generated electrical supply. GreenQloud uniquely extend this further by providing customers with detailed energy consumption data, including estimates of the network energy usage beyond the data center all the way out to the client device. The company then converts this data to provide an estimation of carbon using appropriate emissions factors based on the location of the user and the route through the network.

The service will be priced to be competitive with Amazon Web services. GreenQloud's primary platform has been built on top of the open-source cloud platform Cloud.com, with homegrown metering and an app-store-type service portal. Furthermore, GreenQloud's has developed add-ons to the Cloud.com platform to show energy use of the cloud. In addition, the console provides a Web-based interface for its S3-compatible service, a secure HTML5-based virtual desktop viewer for virtual servers. Moreover, the company has written an Amazon API bridge called CloudBridge for its platform based on the Cloud.com platform. Plans include building a community-based platform-as-a-service — building an affiliate/reseller program using green credentials and working with InfiniBand manufacturers to test and develop InfiniBand in the virtualized environment to improve interaction between cloud computing and HPC environments. GreenQloud has partnered with Scality to provide object-based data storage that uses simple and multicolumn indexing (similar to NoSQL; any application written for Amazon's S3 will work in this environment). However, the applications need to support object-oriented storage.

There has been much hype about the potential environmental benefits of cloud, primarily delivered through the inherent resource efficiency potentially achievable with cloud, as well as the potential for reduced carbon emissions through attention to location and appropriate energy management. We have seen claims from Force.com and Microsoft (see www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/nov10/11-04CloudCutsCarbon.mspx) about the relative energy and carbon efficiency of their services. Despite these claims, there remains little objective and rigorous evidence and analysis to support the realities of improved environmental performance in the cloud. While the potential efficiencies of cloud are clear, most cloud providers rely on energy-efficient data centers and on the inherent potential for resource efficiencies of shared resources and the potential for reduced overprovisioning, yet do little or nothing to reduce the environmental impact beyond that.

GreenQloud's base in Iceland gives it a plentiful supply of inexpensive low- or zero-emission electricity, with no smoke screen or tricks created by the use of emissions factors and renewable energy certificates (or their equivalents).

Challenges: While energy costs and carbon emissions will increasingly be part of the growing focus on sustainable procurement for most large enterprises, the reality is that it is a niche value proposition today. As such, commercialization of GreenQloud's interesting and innovative approach will be hard work.

If it chooses to, existing cloud providers could "offset" at least the data center portion of their carbon emissions through a relatively easy, but costly process of procurement. With its base in Iceland, GreenQloud will not incur those potentially significant costs.

As GreenQloud expands beyond Iceland to better serve more-latency-sensitive services, it will face the same commercial trade-offs as existing cloud service providers have in securing an inexpensive, low-carbon electrical supply. Given its intention to franchise the brand with partners in other geographies, maintaining the zero-carbon premise will be increasingly difficult. The difference for GreenQloud is that it is building part of its brand around "greenness."

Who Should Care: GreenQloud should be considered by software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers that want to build in sustainability as part of their branding strategy, organizations looking for carbon-neutral cloud-based HPC and storage services, and those for whom location within the European Economic Area (EEA) is beneficial for data protection. The approach to sustainability taken by GreenQloud raises the stakes for other cloud service providers positioning themselves as "green."

Atlanta, Georgia (www.joulex.net)

Analysis by Simon Mingay

Why Cool: Energy management is pretty cool these days. As a result, a lot of vendors, large and small, have entered this space, approaching the capability from many different directions and making for an increasingly complex landscape. Several factors make JouleX particularly interesting:

• The company provides a level of energy management capability over any IP-connected device, from the humble IP phone or access point, through network switches, imaging devices, PCs and workstations, to servers, storage and, ultimately, building infrastructures such as power distribution units (PDUs), uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and HVAC systems. So, this is not a point solution as far as devices are concerned. Actual functionality includes agentless power management of office equipment, energy use visibility and reporting, load-adaptive networking and computing, and enterprise-sustainable procurement and reporting.

• With such an ambitious range of functionality and equipment, JouleX is agentless. But by rather cleverly developing interfaces it calls "asset connectors," the vendor is able to make use of existing management platforms to leverage additional functionality that the enterprise may have.

• With an opt-out option, anonymized energy consumption data is stored in the cloud that can be used to improve the accuracy of energy consumption estimates, as well as potentially for benchmarking.

Challenges: This is an incredibly crowded, fragmented area. While no one is directly comparable, JouleX has to compete with many players. In the PC space, its rivals include vendors such as 1E, Verdiem and Greentrac. As it moves into the data center, JouleX will be competing with Sentilla, Power Assure, nlyte Software and the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) vendors. JouleX has yet to make inroads into building infrastructure. Maintaining its niche will be an ongoing battle. If an enterprise is managing its energy management needs in a very siloed way, JouleX will struggle.

Because JouleX is agentless, it is dependent on the energy monitoring and management capabilities of the device, available via a management platform for which it has developed a "connector" to obtain accurate real-usage data. Failing that, JouleX approximates energy consumption when hardware configuration and utilization data is available, or, as an option of last resort, it relies on a lookup table to estimate consumption.

So far, JouleX been most successful in the distributed environment, and it is likely that this will remain its sweet spot. It intends to move into the data center, which will be its biggest challenge.

Although most organizations start with energy monitoring, there's limited value in that. As we have seen at the desktop, organizations must be able to control these devices to save money and justify the investment in this kind of solution. In the data center, while monitoring has value, organizations remain some way from taking advantage of the control functionality of JouleX.

Who Should Care: For enterprises seeking visibility of energy consumption or estimated energy consumption, and, more importantly, varying levels of control across all their heterogeneous IP connected devices at a relatively low price point, JouleX is an interesting option.

Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada (www.remsoft.com)

Analysis by Stephen Stokes

Why Cool: Technology convergence and cost factors, coupled with other related market-transforming agents, appear to have collectively positioned us at the dawn of the "smart interconnected and intelligent era." For technology vendors and end-user clients, this has resulted in a rapid shift in mind-set as vendors and clients have moved to a time frame focused on real-time interaction between various infrastructure elements and other assets and associated smart information systems. Real-time analytics is very good for instantaneous optimization of countless functions and processes. But for a wide spectrum of infrastructure and other assets, the prevailing instantaneous-smart-system view of the world excessively discounts consideration of the long-term optimization of assets throughout their full design life cycle.

Remsoft is a software company succeeding in stretching the concentration span of smart-era analytics to consider the full life cycle impact of very long-lived assets. Remsoft's sustainability-focused asset life cycle optimization journey started in rural New Brunswick, Canada, where for almost two decades it has built out a client base in the forestry sector. Full life cycle management of forestry assets requires up to and beyond a century-long time frame. Remsoft's Woodstock product dominates this relatively small and highly specialized marketplace.

What's cool about Remsoft is not so much its computerized custodianship of a significant proportion of managed forest resources, but the manner in which it has been able to leverage their linear programming and analytical capabilities to other significant, capital-intensive, and, in some cases, highly problematic assets. The best example of this is the multimillion-dollar savings Remsoft has delivered for federal clients via their long-term optimization of the maintenance, repair and replacement of highway roads, culverts and bridges. Remsoft has been widely involved in infrastructure redevelopment programs in the past two years as part of U.S. and global stimulus and recovery funding efforts. But Remsoft very clearly demonstrates that, as President Barack Obama put it, "shovel ready" is not necessarily a financially optimized basis for transportation infrastructure redevelopment. Remsoft is able to achieve sustainable and cost-effective management and maintenance outcomes for these and other high-value, high-profile assets.

Remsoft reminds us that, even in an era of smart systems and advanced metering, we need to continue to model and plan scenarios efficiently for the total cost of asset ownership, maintenance and operation. The scope for applying Remsoft analytics to global transportation infrastructure and other assets is enormous.

Challenges: Remsoft has enjoyed a year-over-year organic growth for almost two decades. To continue to dominate the relatively small forestry asset management market while growing into infrastructure markets will challenge the support teams and sales and marketing functions. Ideally, Remsoft needs to build a sophisticated ecosystem of secondary sales channel partners via engineering consultancies, service providers and business process outsourcers, and to allow them to gain traction in these new and rapidly changing markets. Remsoft also must ensure that end-user clients understand the full extent of the cost savings that its tools offer. Full realization of the potential and business value of its solutions would also be more readily achievable via the integration of more-sophisticated data visualization and other tools.

Who Should Care: Engineers, planners, analysts and other specialists and strategists who manage long-lived infrastructure and other assets should be interested in Remsoft. The global boom in transportation infrastructure makes this sector an obvious "white hot" space where Remsoft tools can deliver radical savings.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada (www.tcnc5.com)

Analysis by Stephen Stokes

Why Cool: The Continuum Network (TCN) has been providing consulting services for sustainable business for more than a decade. During that time, TCN has become a trusted advisor and consultant to large corporations, primarily in Canada. These corporations cover a wide range of industrial sectors, from basic materials and mining, to retail, to financial services, to real estate. One of the challenges of delivering actionable, sustainable business plans for organizations is the requirement of an interposed platform to collect, visualize, analyze and communicate actual corporate performance. When viewed through the lens of the various stakeholders or the investment community, corporate sustainable performance extends substantially beyond simple measures of GHG or water or waste emissions, and must be focused and framed around economic and social parameters, as well as basic environmental information.

The lack of a robust sustainability performance management tool that incorporates a wide cross-section of preloaded end-user-definable parameters that can capture the sustainable performance of an organization at a variety of enterprise, facility, and individual site scales, as well as supply and business value chains, prompted TCN to build its own. The result is TCNC5, a tool designed by sustainability experts and C-level executives for application in businesses focused on improving and managing their sustainability-related performance.

TCN's sustainability management and reporting platform enables clients to reduce operating expenses through resource reduction and increased productivity, mitigate risk through engagement and disclosure, and increase revenue through leveraging new opportunities. The product also reinforces positive brand image and competitive positioning, and enhances the management and reporting of stakeholder engagement, supply chain performance, and business best practices through verified communication.

A key differentiator that adds to TCN's "coolness" is its focus on benchmarking and financial verification, and analysis of sustainable performance. This is key in an environment that still lacks regulated national or international standards for reporting. TCNC5 has been developed with an eye toward future regulations and formal reporting requirements by incorporating a full cross-section of reporting parameters. These are based on regulatory requirements, the industry sector involved and corporate objectives. TCNC5 also incorporates XBRL-tagging to enable auditable population of reports for regulators, which are likely to be on the increase across global markets.

Challenges: Opportunities for the application of TCN's proprietary methodology and software application are considerable. Perhaps the most significant challenge for TCN in this emerging marketplace is deciding on a strategic path, which could focus on growing its consulting services, continuing the further development and rollout of TCNC5, or both. TCN has yet to fully maximize the value of its software tools or maximize market awareness of them. The company is at a crossroads: It must decide to take in substantial investment or partner to pursue growth in consulting and software development, or try to achieve growth opportunities independently. The challenge for TCN is that the time for such analysis and tools is now. This means the company must rapidly move to maximize the value of its tool among the market leaders. This is particularly relevant, given that some of the larger software houses, such as SAP and CA Technologies, have built out comparable sustainable performance management tools.

Who Should Care: TCN should interest managers and executives tasked with rollup reporting of the sustainable performance of organizations, as well as the long-term development of sustainable business strategies. These include sustainability officers, environmental, health and safety specialists, and operational and financial executives.