Whether driven by emerging regulations, cost, stockholder concerns, or customer demand, this overview will help the reader to:
- Understand your enterprise energy/carbon measurement, management, and reporting requirements and goals.
- Identify relevant products and vendors to meet your requirements.
- Identify trends that may impact your planning assumptions and buying decisions.
More than 60 vendors currently offer tools to support some aspect of measurement, management, or monetization of energy and/or carbon. In the past 36 months, some early entrants have merged or been acquired, and significant further consolidation is expected in the next 12-36 months. As the market matures, we see functionality converging such that it becomes more difficult to make purchasing decisions based on specific features, which makes it important to choose a vendor based on a variety of risk factors. With that in mind, we started with a candidate list of 20 vendors using a set of preliminary function and risk criteria. We expanded the list after interviewing vendors and buyers to include additional vendors who were recognized as serious competitors to those in our original list. Based on that exercise, we invited approximately 30 firms to participate in this evaluation project, and then narrowed the list by pruning those who could not meet our final criteria (including customer references, demonstrated market impact, and evidence of sufficient intellectual and financial capital).