Hara Expands Team and Offerings Toward Energy Management; Announces New Customers

At the recent Hara Energy & Sustainability Summit in San Francisco, Hara announced a new CEO, new products, and new service offerings – all focused on energy management and reduction. While Hara will continue to support its offerings for sustainability, the primary investment and focus is clearly on energy management. This pragmatic move matches the increasing market need for solutions that reduce energy and carbon emissions. With a strong balance sheet, team and product, Hara remains an important vendor for large companies to evaluate for energy management and sustainability software and services.

The new CEO, Dan Leff, has 30 years of operating experience leading energy services companies, including leadership positions at Invensys and Enron Energy Services. After holding the COO position, Dan was selected to be chairman and CEO of Enron Energy Services by the creditor-appointed management team to lead the parent corporation following its 2001 bankruptcy filing. His background in energy complements the enterprise software experience of the founding team and investors. The sales team is also being infused with individuals with experience with selling energy solutions, a contrast to other vendors which deploy traditional software sales reps.

New software offerings were announced. The existing functionality will continue in the base product, now called Hara Energy and Sustainability System of Record. The company announced five modules for this base product and these modules will be delivered over several quarters. Demonstrations of three modules were shown:
• Insight - for energy spend analysis and reporting
• Modeling, Forecasting, Budgeting - for energy budgeting and forecasting
• Efficiency Planning and Optimization – for energy project planning and tracking
Pricing and availability for these modules have not yet been announced.

Hara will continue to support existing carbon, water, and waste features in the base product, but additional features on these areas are a lower priority as the existing product has most of the sustainability features that companies currently need.

All of these software products focus on delivering an energy management and sustainability “system of record” for large companies.

These software products are supported by new professional service offerings for energy spend analysis, opportunity identification, submetering strategy development, KPI identification, capital planning and other energy management related services. Hara will continue to partner with its existing set of partners for energy services and will undoubtedly continue to refine which services it offers and which ones its partners offer.

Hara’s products and services are particularly apt for lighter energy use or scope 2-centric firms in verticals like consumer packaged goods, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and municipalities where the primary energy spend is for indirect energy use. For very heavy industrial companies that need solutions to reduce energy for production facilities (like furnaces, cement, etc.), Hara will partner with other firms.

New customers were announced, including HP (which uses Hara internally and has non-exclusive relationship to use Hara in its services’ business), eBay, Rackspace and Union Bank. These add to an existing roster of over 50 large companies. A good case study on EMD Millipore, a company that has impressed us over the years with its energy management program, was also released.

This is a natural and pragmatic business move for Hara, as the prices for sustainability and carbon management software has plummeted in the past few years and are not high enough to support a large, venture-backed company.

Companies looking for to manage and reduce energy use, particularly indirect energy use with a very strong set of capabilities for sustainability and carbon management, should consider Hara.

Hara is one of the over 100 companies analyzed for our upcoming (fall/winter 2011) vendor landscape report on energy management software which is part of the emerging Enterprise Smart Grid.