What's the reading? Verdiem's dashboard can be customized to view energy and carbon emissions reductions.
(Credit: Verdiem)Verdiem on Monday is expected to release an add-on to its PC power-management software that gives people a customizable view of energy savings and carbon emissions reductions.
The Seattle-based company said that the software, called Sustainability Dashboard, offers a visual display for a number of metrics, such as savings over time, and translates that into the equivalent of cars removed from the road or trees planted.
It works with Surveyor, a program that lets IT departments automatically put computers on standby mode on a schedule. For example, it can turn off PCs at night that are left on or put a PC on standby after being idle for more than an hour.
The company says it can save a business between $20 and $60 per year by setting up power-management policies and that payback for the upfront investment can come in less than a year.
The company developed the Dashboard product so those savings can be better shared within a business.
"The challenge when you talk about green IT is how do you show tangible results--the economic savings, the carbon reductions--and share that real-time information," said Brett Goodwin, Verdiem's vice president of marketing.
The Dashboard can be customized to view different data--such as changing the date range for money savings--and can be embedded in companies' intranets. Because it works with Surveyor's server-based software, it cannot be embedded in public Web pages.
Verdiem also makes a free PC power-management tool called Edison for individual PC users.
Although power management software has been around for years, there's clearly room for improvement, particularly with rising energy prices and environmental awareness.
Start-up Verdiem on Wednesday released software called Edison that makes it easy for people to schedule when a PC goes into a low power consumption mode at home or at work.
The Edison software lets people set dials for putting a PC into energy-saving mode.
(Credit: Verdiem)Verdiem's CEO, Kevin Klustner, is scheduled to highlight Edison and PC energy consumption during a conference call with Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, Robert Benard, and Intel's Lorie Wigle, president of the Climate Savers computing industry consortium.
PCs can consume as much as 10 percent of a home's energy bill and give off as much carbon dioxide as a family car. Even when a PC's screen saver kicks on, the machine can still consume between 100 watts and 250 watts.
The Edison software doesn't completely shut a computer off but rather moves it to a "suspend" state, which uses less energy. Users can also schedule to shut down the screen and hard drive before going into suspend mode.
The tool lets users have work and home settings. It has a read-out of how much electricity you are saving, also translated into reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and dollar savings.
Estimates will vary widely, depending on electricity rates and type of computer, but Verdiem says the average savings is 410 kilowatt hours a year, or $36.50.
Verdiem, which is bankrolled in part by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was founded by people who were looking for better power management software than what's built into Windows.
But developing the free Edison software isn't entirely altruistic. The sign-up process promotes Verdiem's power management software for businesses, called Surveyor, which the company says can pay for itself within a few years.
The license for Edison is for one person. It runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Talk about low-hanging fruit.
Verdiem on Wednesday is expected to release an update of its software that monitors desktop Windows PCs and puts them in low-power mode when they're idle. A PC usually wastes about two-thirds of the energy it uses.
The application also gathers data on energy usage of PCs on a network so that companies can measure their energy savings and reductions of carbon emissions.
Renewable energy sources are flashy but tend to be more expensive than conventional power.
Verdiem's software lets companies measure energy savings or greenhouse gas reductions.
(Credit: Verdiem)By contrast, energy-efficiency technologies typically have a quicker payback while eliminating waste.
Verdiem's Surveyor application can pay for itself within a year by saving between $20 and $60 per PC, according to a company.
For a large corporate network, that's serious money: a 10,000 PC network could mean half a million dollars in savings, said Matt Heinz, senior director of marketing at the company.
Energy in data centers is getting more attention because usage is going up rapidly with more Web users coming online and more power-hungry servers.
PCs and monitors, meanwhile, are 40 percent of IT budgets' energy usage, according to Gartner. Severs, including cooling, take up around about 23 percent, with the rest in communications, networking, and printers.
Energy conservation is becoming a concern both for IT organizations facing rising costs and people responsible for corporate sustainability initiatives, according to Gartner.
Verdiem touts its environmental credentials: last year, its software saved $6 million and prevented almost 38,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, the company said. That's the equivalent of about 4 million gallons of gas saved, or 8,200 cars not driven for a year.
Verdiem Surveyor 5.0 has a console to centrally configure different devices and additional reporting tools. It also has better integration with Windows Vista and integrates with Intel's vPro PC management technology so that it can access machines that aren't turned on.
The company has about 200 customers.
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