IHS Continues Acquisition Efforts with ESS: Strengths Offerings for Heavy/Medium Emitters

We recently had a briefing with a number of executives from IHS about their recent acquisition of ESS. IHS has acquired a number of environmentally-related firms in the last few years (ESP, Dolphin, EnvironMax) and is one of the Early Leaders in Enterprise Carbon Accounting software for tracking and managing carbon data. ESS is the latest and deepens a robust set of offerings for heavy and medium emitters of carbon, and IHS told us they continue to look for promising acquisitions.

We had numerous questions about the integration of ESS, especially for companies which don’t currently have any IHS products. For these prospects, IHS will conduct a needs assessment as part of the sales process to determine which of its environmental and Greenhouse/Enterprise Carbon Accounting offerings make the most sense. Sales reps will carry all products. From a development standpoint, the ESS and other IHS products are all Microsoft-based and IHS will continue to maintain product roadmaps for each product and build integration elements. Deployment options remain varied from on-premise, to dedicated hosted, to SaaS hosting.

IHS continues to build upon a strong offering for heavy emitters (organizations with a large scope 1 emissions) and heavy EHS requirements. Firms which are scope 2 centric (i.e. mostly office buildings, assembly shops, warehouses, and possibly fleets) will need to evaluate their EHS needs in light of the deep air and compliance depth offered by IHS. Firms concerned about the financial viability of software vendors will find solace in the financial strength of IHS ($1B in revenue, $110m in cash on hand).