With the raft of carbon management and mitigation software tools and consultancies flooding the market of late, the absence of IBM's footprint in this increasingly well-trodden space has been becoming more and more noticeable. Therefore, hearing Gary Rancourt, a business development exec at IBM's Big Green Innovations department, announce an IT-enabled decision support system for carbon management called GreenSigma was less than surprising.
And with a "say no more" name like GreenSigma, it isn't hard to figure out the program's purpose in life. "Looking at those two words together, it kind of becomes intuitively obvious what it is," Rancourt admits, but says that IBM will give the carbon assessment market a new way to optimize the cost/carbon equation.
Speaking at the Corporate Climate Response conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Rancourt said, "We're going to try to set the carbon assessment bar significantly higher with respect to dashboards and analytics. GreenSigma looks at the intimate and interrelated connectedness between what affects cost, both operationally and in the supply chain, and looks at carbon hot spots, and reconciles reducing cost and reducing carbon."
The product is presently in use internally and in alpha release in the U.K. on an external basis, so you will probably be hearing more about IBM's GreenSigma sooner than later.
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