Oracle plants a stake in the world of green software

Oracle has teamed up with environmental, health and safety software specialist ESS to offer joint solutions aimed at helping organizations improve their collection and management of environmental data and programs, while reducing the cost and complexity involved. With this initiative, the two companies are helping to broaden the focus of ‘green IT’ from computing alone to IT’s role in addressing the larger problem of environmental impacts from non-IT processes such as manufacturing, logistics and building operations.

The ESS/Oracle alliance addresses a growing market for environmental management solutions

The alliance was announced last week at Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. It will pair ESS’s environmental data-gathering software with two Oracle solutions – Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Manager, and Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus. The joint solution aims to help customers collect environmental data more quickly, consistently and accurately; to set and enforce environmental policies; to use operational BI to reduce environmental impacts; and to simplify and reduce the cost of generating reports for regulators, customers, and the like.

The companies say they will go to market together but aren’t yet providing details of how they’ll do that. What would make sense would be for them to first target Oracle customers that haven’t yet bought the GRC Manager solution or BI Suite, and use those early engagements to integrate the ESS and Oracle offerings in ways that can be repeated in future engagements. Oracle doesn’t plan to offer environmental monitoring on a standalone basis but over time will build it into a wide range of products, making them more capable and ‘stickier’.

This market is being driven partly by environmental regulations, which are increasing in scope and stringency. Growing public concern about the environment, especially but not limited to climate change, is another key driver. That concern expresses itself in a growing preference for products and services from companies that can demonstrate their environmental credentials. Management depends on measurement, and measurement depends on the collection of accurate data; together, ESS and Oracle provide that capability. (For an in-depth analysis of this topic, see Ovum’s recent report, Green IT: the software opportunity.)

Oracle painted itself green at Open World, and why not? Green is so much nicer than the gray of indifference.

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