CPA Firm Issues SOC 1SM Report on Controls at Locus Technologies Relevant to Locus’ Internal Control over Financial Reporting (SSAE 16)

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 12 November 2012 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Cloud-computing enterprise software for environmental, energy, air, water, and compliance management, announced today that the company has undergone a Service Organization Control 1SM examination resulting in a CPA’s report stating that management of Locus Technologies maintained effective controls over the Financial Reporting of its Software as a Service (SaaS) system. The engagement was performed by Cropper Accountancy.

A SOC 1SM report is designed to meet the needs of existing or potential customers who need assurance about the effectiveness of controls at Locus that are relevant to its financial reporting system. This report was prepared in accordance with Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) No. 16, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization, and is specifically intended to meet the needs of the entities that use Locus’ SaaS software and the CPAs that audit Locus’ financial statements, in evaluating the effect of the controls at Locus on the company’s financial statements. Locus’ SOC 1 report is a Type 2–report stating that the presentation and description of Locus’ system is fair, and that its design and operating effectiveness of controls do achieve the related objectives included in the description throughout a specified period of time.

The SOC 1SM report places Locus in a rare category among environmental information management providers to have attained this rigorous classification. In today’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) and risk-management environment, it is essential that service providers like Locus demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards in place so customers can be confident that their data are safe, and that they are being charged fairly.

“We are pleased that our SOC 1SM report has shown that we have the appropriate financial controls in place. This is in addition to a SOC 2 SM report that we received recently that is focused on mitigating risks related to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy of customers’ environmental, energy, sustainability, and compliance data stored in Locus’ Cloud,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “The culture here at Locus is to put our customers first at all times, and it is essential that they feel secure with our financial information management and in trusting us with their data.”

 

Environmental Business Journal Interview with Locus CEO

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Locus Receives SAS 70 Certification

Locus Cloud Computing Environmental Software Platform SAS 70 Certified

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 18 January 2011 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced that it has been certified as compliant with the Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations (SAS 70).

Locus passed an in-depth audit of its control objectives activities pertaining to database management and information technology. The certification places Locus in a rare category among environmental data management providers to have attained the rigorous classification. In today’s risk-management environment, it is essential that service providers like Locus demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards in place so customers can be confident that their data are safe.

“By becoming SAS 70 certified, Locus shows that we are not only in compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but that we hold the security of our customers’ data paramount,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus Technologies.

“Whether your environmental data are currently hosted by another provider, or you’re searching for a company to manage your data, your company should demand evidence that your data are safe and protected by a highly controlled process. We are pleased to know that our customers’ environmental data for water, sustainability, emissions, and greenhouse gas data have been deemed to be in full compliance with SAS 70,” continued Duplan.

In addition to being SAS 70 certified, Locus requires that its key suppliers also comply with SAS 70 standards. For example, Locus’ data center and cloud hosting provider have been certified recently to have processes and safeguards in place. These safeguards are designed to protect Locus’ assets and data that reside in the company’s managed hosting services data center. A service auditor’s examination—performed in accordance with SAS No. 70 Type II—is widely recognized because it confirms that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of its control objectives and activities, which includes controls over information technology services and related processes.

Completion of the SAS 70 Type II examination of Locus’ managed hosting data center proves that an independent accounting and auditing firm has formally evaluated the company’s processes, procedures, and controls. The examination included controls related to service delivery, support services, security, monitoring, change management, data backup, environmental controls, and logical and physical access.

SAS 70 is designated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an acceptable method for an organization’s management to obtain assurance about a third-party service organization’s internal controls without conducting a separate assessment.

As the world’s most comprehensive on-demand software for organizing environmental data and information, Locus is the partner of choice for all organizations that seek a credible and cost-effective solution to their energy and environmental management and reporting needs.

Locus Recognized as Carbon Software Leader

Emissions Trading & Monitoring Software Study Applauds Locus

 

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., December 14, 2009 — In the midst of climate change discussions in Copenhagen, Locus Technologies (Locus), was recognized as one of the oldest and most comprehensive providers of greenhouse gas (GHG) software in a study just published by UtiliPoint International, Inc., a key utility and energy industry analysis and consulting firm.

The UtiliPoint study focuses on both software aimed at emission reporting and software aimed at emissions trading as well as the need for a link between the two types of software. “We are very pleased with leading industry analyst UtiliPoint’s comprehensive study of software providers for greenhouse gas management and with their recognition of Locus,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus.

The Emissions Trading & Monitoring Software Study highlights Locus’ experience in the domain of Software as a Service (SaaS), not only for GHG emissions management, but also as a general leader in the complex space of environmental sustainability software, including water quality management. UtiliPoint predicts that Locus’ record of environmental software expertise will help Locus to become a top player in the emerging field of GHG data management and reporting.

eGHG, Locus’ GHG emissions monitoring software, is applauded in the UtiliPoint report. This software can create an emissions inventory that can be easily verified and reported to various emissions reporting programs in the US and internationally.

“Whether or not carbon is regulated through the Clean Air Act as announced by EPA last week, or a United States Federal cap-and-trade program is created in the near future, a comprehensive monitoring and reporting system is still needed for compliance with the Clean Air Act, various voluntary registries such as The Climate Registry or Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), and for trading with the various international programs already in place. We are already witnessing an explosive growth in carbon data, analysis, and reporting that comes on top of other environmental data streams such as water and sustainability. Locus provides one stop shopping for all enterprise environmental software needs,” added Dr. Duplan.

Locus Technologies Receives Vendor Rating

Locus Rated by Leading Analyst Firm

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 11 May 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus) today announced that Gartner, Inc., the leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry, has rated the company “Promising” in a recent report.

“Locus is very pleased to have received a Gartner Vendor Rating. Our current customers already know the value our Cloud Computing solutions bring to their environmental information management challenges” said Locus President and CEO, Neno Duplancic. “We believe Gartner’s coverage of our firm confirms our position in the market and our commitment to providing customers with cost-effective and innovative SaaS software solutions that meet their current and emerging environmental data and information management needs, including addressing upcoming GHG and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting.”

Locus’ flagship environmental data management system EIM is used worldwide to manage and report environmental data and information and is managing over 100 million environmental data records for some of the world’s largest companies. Locus’ ePortal provides the platform to bring together Locus’ modular applications into a single integrated solution that can be tailored for environmental compliance, greenhouse gas tracking, or environmental health and safety (EHS) tracking depending on a company’s individual need. Locus’ EHS module also provides GRI indicator tracking and reporting capabilities. All of Locus’ solutions are on-demand providing customers with cost-effective and timely implementation options to meet their business requirements.

 

VENDOR RATING DISCLAIMER
The Vendor Rating is copyrighted 21 April 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Vendor Rating is an evaluation of a vendor as a whole and is based on Gartner’s assessment of the vendor’s vision and execution for a product or service, relative to Gartner’s analysis of clients’ requirements. It is not intended as a comparison relative to competitors in the market. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Vendor Rating, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner “Vendor Rating: Locus Technologies” by Dan Miklovic, 21 April 2009
The complete report is available to Gartner clients at www.gartner.com.

For more information, visit www.locustec.com or contact Ms. Marian Carr at (650) 960-1640.

Locus to Present Cloud Computing for EHS Management at EUEC 2009 in Phonenix, AZ

Join Locus at the EUEC 2009 Annual Conference & Expo in Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix, AZ., 1-4 February 2009 |Booth #827 —Locus will present a paper on Cloud Computing solutions for the EHS industry and display our newest cloud computing products (eEHS and eTask) as well as our flagship product EIM.  Please visit us at Booth 827 and see the systems that are changing how environmental professionals manage, analyze, and report environmental data and information.

Is a large portion of your environmental data sitting in spreadsheets and home-built databases?

Robust enterprise databases are standard tools in other industries, but, for whatever reason, the environmental business has failed to fully embrace them. What happens to the sampling and analytical data generated from the investigations, cleanups, air emissions monitoring, or operation and maintenance of a company’s sites? For many, it is entered into spreadsheets, a commercial client/server database, or a home-grown database—with spreadsheets often being the most popular of these alternatives.

Let’s suppose a company has 10-million analytical records stored in spreadsheets and databases dispersed across multiple offices. Our research shows that the average cost to organize, manage, and report this data through independent systems over a 3-year period would be more than $2 million. Stop by Locus’ Booth #827 and let us demonstrate how using our Locus EIM on-demand data management system can drop your number by 85%—or more than a staggering $1.7 million.

 

Locus Presents | Cloud Computing Solutions for Global Environmental Sustainability Reporting, by Marian Carr and Robert Albo | Session G5: EMIS and EHS | Tuesday, 3 February 2009 1:40 pm

Locus’ Environmental Software Provides US Virgin Island Refinery with Key Savings

Hovensa Moves to Cloud Computing with Locus’ EIM Software

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 12 January 2009 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, today announced that the Hovensa Refinery in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands has selected Locus Technologies Environmental Information Management (EIM) system to streamline managing environmental sampling and remedial operations data at the refinery.

Hovensa is a joint venture between subsidiaries of Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). This refinery is one of the ten largest in the world and one of the most modern in the United States with a crude oil processing capacity of 500,000 barrels per day (BPD). Hovensa operates its facilities on 2,000 acres on the south shore of St. Croix and receives and processes crude oil from around the world.

After reviewing available options to manage their environmental data, Hovensa opted for EIM to meet their demanding requirements, which include a single data repository accessible by all their vendors, regardless of location. EIM’s cloud computing platform was the ideal system to provide the access desired and the robust data management features to address both sampling and operations data.

“Locus is excited that Hovensa selected EIM and is using the system to its fullest,” said Locus President Neno Duplancic. “It’s very gratifying when a customer fully embraces the system and its potential to not only manage their data but to drive cost savings through data collection and report automation. Using EIM’s flexible interface, Hovensa can streamline sample planning and data validation using mainland contractors and labs and produce automated reports of operations status all from the same system.”

Locus to promote seminar on carbon trading and finance in San Francisco

Greening of America Through On-Demand Software

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., July 2, 2007 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in Web-based environmental data and information management services, will join Global Change Associates and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP to promote a seminar on carbon trading and finance. The seminar will be held on July 17, 2007, at Pillsbury’s San Francisco office at 50 Fremont Street.

Led by carbon markets experts Peter C. Fusaro and Jay Gould, partner and co-leader of Pillsbury’s Investment Funds & Investment Management Team, the seminar, “Carbon Trading is the Missing Link in Clean Tech Investment,” will explore what role carbon trading plays in clean technology investment and how to establish a successful carbon hedge fund.

“This is the second in a series of clean technology investment seminars we are hosting with Pillsbury, which launched one of the first multidisciplinary climate change practices in the nation. We are very excited that Locus Technologies, the leader in environmental information management, will promote the seminar, as the information management component of carbon trading is an important factor to consider in implementing sound carbon strategy,” said Fusaro. “Our last seminar attracted more than 150 people as California continues to be the center of carbon market activity for the foreseeable future.”

“We see carbon emissions management as the next logical expansion of our highly successful LocusFocus environmental portal. Many of our Fortune 100 customers using LocusFocus for environmental data and information management will find it easy to expand in our on-demand portal to include management of greenhouse gases (GHG). Many of Locus’s customers are actively looking for the tools and advice to move forward and formulate real carbon strategies in advance of upcoming regulations. Once regulations are promulgated, companies could lose substantial dollars by not planning ahead for this change. Locus’s customers that are already engaged in this highly topical discussion and are prepared to adopt carbon management strategy at this time can leverage the LocusFocus environmental portal for GHG data management with minimal additional investment and provide their shareholders with transparency on this issue. This seminar is perfect forum to get up to speed and educated on this important matter, particularly for the companies with operations in California that will be subject to California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Assembly Bill No. 32 (AB32) relating to air pollution,” said Dr. Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus Technologies.

The seminar will cover the basics of environmental trading, carbon trading and finance, some clean tech solutions, information management, how to implement a carbon reduction under the Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and the basics of how to build a carbon fund.

GHG management will impose additional burden for environmental information management. Establishing a comprehensive GHG inventory is the foundation for future GHG management and compliance strategy. However, performing the GHG inventory can be a challenging process for many organizations, particularly for data acquisition, validation, and real time reporting. To make intelligent decisions about GHG management, clean energy, and other factors affecting the quality and sustainability of life, businesses and government entities must have better tools to manage and interpret this information in real time. Robust environmental information management systems are needed to store and analyze this data, and the LocusFocus environmental portal is a solution.

“Carbon trading is a new asset class for hedge fund finance and investment,” said Gould. “Indeed a recent report by the National Venture Capital Association showed that while U.S. venture capital investments, as a whole, were down by 33 percent in 2006, compared to five years ago, investments in American clean tech companies were up 243 percent in that time–more than two and a half times the growth rate of the next strongest industry over that period.”

 

ABOUT GLOBAL CHANGE ASSOCIATES INC.
Global Change Associates Inc. is a leading edge consultancy on energy and environmental financial markets based in New York lead by Peter C. Fusaro. Peter is the best selling author of “What Went Wrong at Enron” and a leading proponent of market-based solutions for environmental remediation. He created the annual Wall Street Green Trading Summit in New York each spring, and is recognized as an international leader in clean technology and emissions trading. He co-founded the Energy Hedge Fund Center in 2004.

Locus introduces environmental Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) standards

A growing need exists for a standardized format for transmitting environmental electronic data. There are more than 15 different standards in use in the U.S. alone, most of which are antiquated. Locus leverages the latest XML technology to drive standard consolidation and ease of use.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 30 2007 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental data management software, announced today the release of a set of its first standard Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) formats for the reporting of environmental laboratory analytical data. With the recent signings of several large Fortune 100 clients, and the upcoming tenfold increase in the number of sites with data in the company’s flagship product, EIM™, a growing need exists for a standardized format for transmitting electronic data. Several EDD formats already exist in the environmental industry—some promulgated by government agencies—and others by vendors of commercial software products. However, some of these format “standards” suffer from the requirement that data be submitted in multiple files, while other formats, have antiquated requirements related to field lengths or valid values that originated at a time when hard disk space was at a premium.

Locus’s Extensible Markup Language (XML) formatted single-file standard EDD allows for much more flexibility in file structure, because the data self-identifies each field using labels to bracket its contents. The content is similar and compliant with the (Staged Electronic Data Deliverable (SEDD) format. SEDD is an inter-agency effort spearheaded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to create a generic XML-based format for electronic delivery of analytical data for environmental industry.

To simplify the work of legacy systems, Locus is also releasing an EDD standard format, which consists of 53 explicitly defined fields maintained in a single file. Clients may request that additional custom fields be included to meet specific agency, the major state submission, or project requirements. The selection of the fields that are included in the Locus EIM EDD format was based on input from Locus’s user community and experts in analytical data management, as well as a review of the most popular currently used EDDs. The contents of the format permit data to be validated to EPA Level II, if a customer so desires. Locus envisions this format to be transitional for the companies and laboratories that are not yet ready to adopt XML-based technology, but are tired of dealing with multiple and antiquated file formats, which only serve to increase IT costs.

Since the release of EIM in 1999, Locus has allowed companies to design their own EDD formats, and Locus will continue to support this flexibility in its systems. However, Locus believes that the promulgation of a standardized format will allow laboratories to reduce the costs of creating EDDs, minimize errors in the reporting of data, and more quickly support new EIM clients.

“As the leader in environmental data management software, Locus strives to provide guidance, direction, and endorsement to the best ideas in an effort to standardize data management processes. Currently, there are more than 15 different standards for analytical data submittals, and this needs to change,” said Locus’s president and CEO, Neno Duplancic. “We believe that the standards we are releasing today, one transitional and one XML-based, will take steps toward achieving that goal and will help drive uniformity in the marketplace. With more than 35,000 sites reporting through LocusFocus EIM, Locus customers represent the largest users of environmental lab data, so this effort should help drive consolidation of the standards. Locus is committed to meeting all federal and state EDDs and leading the industry in reducing proliferation of incompatible formats by strongly endorsing XML-based SEDD standards,” added Duplancic.

Locus’s XML-based EDD accepts files in Stage 2a SEDD format, which contains the basic analytical results (including the sample ID, analyte, result, and qualifier) plus method quality control data. The EIM import module includes data verification and consistency checks outlined in the Document Type Definition (DTD) for Stage 2a, as well as forms for viewing the data in the imported SEDD file. Both formats can be downloaded for free from the Locus’s website at www.locustec.com.