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Locus Technologies Receives 2013 EBJ Business Achievement Award

Environmental Business Journal Recognizes Locus for Growth and Innovation

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 22 January 2014 — Locus Technologies (Locus) announced today that the Environmental Business Journal® (EBJ) granted the company the 2013 award for Information Technology in the environmental and energy industry for the eighth time in the last 10 years.

Locus was recognized for significantly enhancing its suite of software products, and adding new customers and renewing current ones for both software and verification services.

In 2013 Locus generated record software revenue and added customers in the food and beverage, manufacturing, mining, and railroad industries, as well as had its contract with Los Alamos National Laboratory significantly expanded and extended for an additional four years. The company introduced the Locus platform for sustainability, energy, health and safety, and environmental compliance management and reporting, which offers fully integrated cloud-based software that brings all mission-critical environmental applications together in an ERP-like system. Locus also added new functionality to its flagship EIM software system, including the generation of Annual Radiological Environmental Operating Report (AREOR) Data Summary Tables, the automation of Discharge Monitoring Reports (DMRs), and the ability to support imports and exports from ERPIMS: the system the U.S. Air Force uses for validation and management of data from all environmental projects at its bases.

Additional achievements for Locus in 2013 include earning a Microsoft Gold Application Development competency for demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet customers’ evolving needs, being recognized as one of the top 10 sustainability management software providers by the market analyst firm Verdantix, being listed as the only software provider to make the list of top 200 environmental companies by Engineering News-Record (ENR) magazine, and being named the second largest environmental firm in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Journal.

“We are very proud to receive the prestigious EBJ Information Technology award in environmental business for the eighth time. No other company has accomplished anything close to this level of recognition in the emerging space of cloud-based environmental information management, the on-demand computing space for data management in the environmental industry that Locus pioneered in 1997,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “I believe this highlights Locus’ relentless dedication to developing top-notch environmental and sustainability management software systems, and would like to thank both the Locus team, and our customers who have trusted us with the management of their data for making this award possible.”

“In what is widely regarded as a stable market, a number of companies exceeded the norms of low single-digit growth with double-digit growth or ambitious ventures into new practice areas or technology development,” said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI, San Diego), publisher of Environmental Business Journal. “Locus continues to influence the industry with its forward-thinking product set and eye for customer needs.”

The 2013 EBJ awards will be presented at a special ceremony at the Environmental Industry Summit XII in San Diego, Calif. on March 12-14, 2014. The Environmental Industry Summit is an annual three-day executive retreat hosted by EBI Inc.

ABOUT EBI
Founded in 1988, Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI, San Diego, Calif.) is a research, publishing and consulting company that specializes in defining emerging markets and generating strategic market intelligence for companies, investors and policymakers. EBI publishes Environmental Business Journal®, the leading provider of strategic information for the environmental industry, and Climate Change Business Journal®, which covers nine segments of the Climate Change Industry. EBI also performs contract research for the government and private sector and founded the Environmental Industry Summit, an annual three-day event for executives in the environmental industry.

Enterprise Environmental and Sustainability Information Management: There is a Better Way

Data published by the Environmental Business Journal indicate that the global environmental market is approaching one trillion dollars in annual expenditures. Last year U.S. environmental industry generated revenues of about one-third of that. The industry continues to grow at an average rate of five to ten percent per year, and is poised to grow even faster in 2014 than in any previous year.

Despite its impressive growth, some troubling trends persist within the industry. Most notably is the industry’s failure to embrace the cloud-based information management revolution. Not adopting the latest technologies for capturing, storing, distributing, managing, visualizing and reporting information increases costs of managing emissions to air, water, and soil, delays the cleanup of contaminated sites and management of climate change information necessary to better understand causes of global warming phenomena.

Most companies “own” their financial, human resource, customer relations, and other data. This information typically resides on computers located in the company’s facilities, or it may be housed off-site in data centers managed by an outside party, or more recently in the SaaS-based Cloud applications. Regardless of which alternative is adopted, both are similar in that:

Information is stored in a consistent and organized manner in central databases developed by professional software companies.
Employees within the company have, to the extent that their privileges permit, continuous and unimpeded access to these data.
Companies unquestionably own the data and are able to change support vendors at will.

However, the way companies with environmental liabilities manage and store their environmental information and data stands in marked contrast to the model they have adopted for all their other key data. Historically, environmental consultants have used narrowly focused applications built on spreadsheets and client/server databases to serve the complex software requirements of this market. Today’s landscape of available technology options has consolidated; new and better options exist. While planned IT spending on environmental software is rising, organizations are still struggling to identify software and service providers that can support environmental information management in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed with other enterprise initiatives and enterprise software, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 10: Liberation from Non-Strategic IT Issues

Cloud applications should free environmental managers and their company’s IT Departments and their teams from time and energy spent on non-strategic, back-office IT operations and software coding. Today and into the future, the most highly valued CIOs—the ones that become heroes to the business—are those whose actions are closely aligned with strategic business initiatives and drive the IT projects that support those initiatives.

Environmental managers and executives should be able to focus on the business processes and subject matter, and the value they bring to their organization, and not on the nuts-and-bolts of technology and IT infrastructure. If environmental managers and their departments are doing things someone else could do, like software development and maintenance, then things that only they can do are not being done. A data center is a commodity, and a company that specializes in running a data center is going to do it better than environmental or even IT department can. And that frees environmental professionals up to do what they do best, which is to focus on strategic work and innovations and find ways to provide true business value, lower the compliance cost, automate reporting, reduce environmental liability, and ultimately lower the operational cost while increasing their company’s brand value.

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 9: Control

Cloud applications should allow organizations complete control of their environmental and sustainability data, even though it is located off-site. Organizations are freed of application maintenance; additionally, there should be no roadblocks or bureaucracy to hinder authorized individuals’ ability to import, export, purge, and archive data to and from the application without having to first contact the SaaS vendor. Customers own their data! SaaS providers should make it possible to have a “sandbox” version of the production environment, so an organization’s project team can view and analyze data, and experiment with features and configurations before going into production.

What’s more, high-quality SaaS providers should provide regular audit reports for their customers about the data in their applications. Customers should be able to understand, very quickly, the changes that were made to their data and who made them and when.

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 8: Faster Deployment

Since cloud applications do not require investments and installation of hardware and software, organizations should be able to get them running and productive in a fraction of the time compared to on-premises software. This is particularly true for complex environmental and sustainability information management and compliance applications. On day one, customers are able to look at demonstration data, and very quickly after that they can test their data in a SaaS system to see how it looks and works.

Multi-tenant SaaS deployments are highly iterative and collaborative with the customer, and a provider’s deployment staff should be skilled down to the most minute of tasks.
With multi-tenant, configurable cloud applications, the coding is outsourced. With the DOE implementation of Locus, for example, the business side of the organization was able to play a significant role in leading the project, which let the customer focus its finite IT resources on data, integrations, and working with the business team to ensure technology and processes were aligned. In a configurable cloud application environment, once the processes and training are in place, you turn it on. It is that simple.

Locus Introduces New Platform for Environmental Enterprise Resource Planning

The new Locus platform offers a highly configurable, user-friendly interface to fully meet individual organizations’ environmental management needs

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 21 October 2013 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in cloud-based environmental and sustainability management software, introduces its newest platform to redefine how companies organize, manage, visualize, and report their environmental, sustainability, and compliance information.

Today, environmental, sustainability, and energy managers for organizations of all sizes face myriad options from software suppliers offering various single-domain applications. Challenged with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape, these managers must select a software provider that can adapt to new compliance constraints and the constant changes of existing regulations, often with multijurisdictional requirements; unfortunately, most software suppliers have rigid platforms or applications that fail to keep up with constantly changing needs, are hard to integrate, and are often obsolete before they are even implemented.

To address this industry challenge, the company designed the new Locus platform to provide rich functionality in a simple way so that it would be easy for customers to make the most of their data management and reporting requirements. In addition, the new platform helps companies avoid many of the costs generally associated with implementing traditional software systems thanks to its simple setup, navigation, and configuration options, thereby eliminating the need for expensive implementations, user training, and customizations.

Locus addressed common barriers to using environmental management software when designing the new Locus platform. Specifically, Locus conducted a gap analysis of current software offerings. It identified challenges through feedback from its end users and other industry professionals, and through customer surveys conducted by several industry research analysts’ firms over the last two years. Specifically, users were wary of complex and expensive systems and implementations; a rigid regulatory environment for businesses that made adapting to new systems costly and complicated; and integration of a new platform with legacy systems.

The resulting Locus platform offers an intuitive interface with the immense flexibility to incorporate features such as drag-and-drop forms creation, visual business-process modeling, Excel import/export integration, and a rich and configurable user dashboards and reporting interface. Locus created every feature with the end user in mind to promote quick and easy data capture and task management. Finally, customers should see significant savings over traditional software offerings both at the time of implementation and over the long term. Because the Locus platform’s system, upgrades, and maintenance are cloud-based rather than configured on individual user workstations, while users can configure the way they use the software, they do not need to pay for customization at the individual level.

“We listened to industry users and created configurable dashboards that are clean, dynamically driven, easy to read, and easy to access. This platform will improve companies’ data collection, analysis, and most importantly, reporting capabilities,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “The new Locus platform will make the required compliance and EH&S reporting expected of most companies more streamlined. The end result is the mitigation of regulatory risks and fines.”

The launch of the latest Locus platform follows the same guidelines and goals that the company established during the original inception of ePortal in 2000. This version is the latest embodiment of Locus’ industry differentiation: to offer an integrated solution so that companies can manage all of their environmental, energy, water, waste, carbon, air, health and safety, and compliance information in one place.

“We’ve updated the platform based on industry wants and needs,” remarked Duplan. “This isn’t a product of different solutions pieced together to look like one; it is the ‘whole solution.’ We have always created our products in this same vein because it means less time to configure, less time to implement, and far fewer support requirements. And it means a dramatically lower cost than customers have seen in the past with the ERP providers or point solutions from different vendors. Budget has long been a barrier to implementation and we are stepping up to the plate to solve that problem.”

Locus will conduct the first live demonstrations of the new platform at the Locus booth at the National Association for Environmental Management 2013 EHS Management Forum from October 23-25 in Montreal.

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 7: Predictable Total Cost of Ownership Model

There should be no surprise costs with cloud applications. Implementation costs should be predictable, and subscription-based pricing should be transparent with no hidden fees. Cloud applications should not require upfront investments in hardware and software license fees.
Real SaaS is a lot more than just hosting and data storing. Where multi-tenancy, a single version of the software and vendor-managed updates all come together and really payoff is having more predictability around your total cost of ownership. There should be no more highly unpredictable projects, with the most common among those being software upgrades.
One thing that can kill a VP of EHS reputation is surprises, particularly surprises with lots of dollar signs. With a valid cloud application to manage environmental and sustainability information and compliance, EH&S manager can determine exactly what it is going to cost over the next five years.

Such predictability lends transparency to the environmental compliance and sustainability budget process and means you will not have to fight budget battles for unexpected costs.

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 6: A High-Performance, Sustainable IT Infrastructure

The cloud application provider should maintain a high-performance IT infrastructure, which includes the data centers and databases, operating systems, networks, security, and storage systems used to run cloud applications and manage customer data. It should have stellar IT operations, security, maintenance, and performance tuning processes.

Livelihood of SaaS companies depends on their ability to securely and effectively manage their operations, and that means keeping pace with the most current technologies. They should also publish live their uptime monitored by the third party.

Cloud applications are also environmentally sustainable due to the multi-tenant infrastructure in which they are delivered. Multi-tenant SaaS reduces electricity consumption, paper waste, and lowers CO2 emissions. A hundred customers, using 100 different systems, is less efficient and more impactful on the environment than those customers all sharing the same data center.

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No. 5: World-Class Data Center and Security

A cloud application provider should be able to offer excellent security and data privacy better than its customers can do on their own, and at no additional cost. Processes and policies should encompass physical, network, application, and data-level security, as well as full backup and disaster recovery. The provider should be compliant with security-oriented laws and auditing programs, including SOC 1 Report on Controls over Financial Reporting (SSAE 16), (formerly known as SAS70 Type II), and SOC 2 Report on Controls over Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy; both developed and administered by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) for use by practitioners in the performance of trust services engagements.

Reputable SaaS providers are proving that SaaS can be done at least as securely as most enterprise implementations, and in some cases more securely. For example, at Locus, direct access to the database is limited to a select set of people on Locus’ operations staff. A typical on-premises ERP implementation would grant this access to a much wider group, creating a security challenge. SaaS providers must take a holistic approach to security, ranging from technical safety guards such as encryption to understanding data privacy laws and compliance, and building those safety guards into every product and process.
Locus has adopted the following SOC 2 principles and related criteria:

Security. The system is protected against unauthorized access (both physical and logical).
Availability. The system is available for operation and use as committed to or agreed upon.
Processing integrity. System processing is complete, accurate, timely, and authorized.
Confidentiality. Information designated as confidential is protected as committed to or agreed upon.
Privacy. Personal information is collected, used, retained, disclosed, and destroyed in conformity with the commitments in the entity’s privacy notice and with criteria set forth in generally accepted privacy principles issued by the AICPA and CICA.

It should be the responsibility of CIOs to conduct due diligence on SaaS providers. Go in and see what they’re doing around data security and privacy.
No one should enter a relationship without thoroughly vetting the provider’s capabilities. Providers that won’t allow you a thorough examination, claiming all kinds of reasons, are the ones to avoid.

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No. 4: Business-Driven Configurability

Cloud computing applications should be configurable, so your IT organization is freed from costly customizations, and business people can configure processes that meet the specific needs of the organization.

The greatest self-inflicted wound customers make is allowing too much customization to software they run on premises. It gets down to how customer balances freedom versus order. Customization is all about freedom, but if you go too far down that road, you lose order. At Locus, we have found that configurable environmental software lets an organization balance freedom and order. A configurable cloud application should include a catalog of industry standard choices, so that it becomes apparent how much time and cost has gone into a company’s previous efforts to customize software just because “a process has always been done that way” . With customizations, customers often are not designing for business processes, they are designing for personalities.

One of the myths of SaaS is that since it is in the cloud, it is one-size-fits-all, but that could not be further from the truth. Real SaaS solutions should not only be configurable for the company, but in different ways for different parts of a company. Many Locus customers with global footprints, for example, require different carbon management processes for different countries, which they can configure in Locus SaaS without the need for customizations. Similarly, customers can configure Locus to deliver DMR and other reports differently for different state requirements or different customer requirements.