Locus Technologies completes SOC 1SM and 2SM certification

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 24 August 2016 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in cloud computing enterprise software for environmental, energy, air, water, and compliance management, is pleased to announce that the company has undergone a Service Organization Control 1SM and 2SM examination. A CPA report has been issued stating that Locus Technologies has maintained effective management over financial reporting, as well as the security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy of its Software as a Service (SaaS) system. The assessment was performed by A-Lign. Locus is proud to have held these reports for the past four years.

The SOC 1SM report provides assurance to current or potential customers about the effectiveness of financial reporting systems at Locus. This report was prepared in accordance with Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) No. 16, Reporting on Controls at a Service Organization. It is specifically intended to meet the needs of the entities that use Locus’ SaaS products 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 1SM 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 achieve the related objectives included in the description throughout a specified period of time.

The SOC 2SM report is designed for customers who inquire about the effectiveness of controls at Locus that are relevant to the security, availability, or processing integrity of the system Locus uses to process customers’ information, or the confidentiality or privacy of that information.

The SOC 2SM report places Locus in a rare category among environmental data 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. Unlike most other environmental data management providers, Locus does not limit the SOC 2SM review to their data centers for hosting, but rather the entirety of the software development and management process, including the data centers.

“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 2SM report we received 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, CEO of Locus Technologies.

“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.”

Locus Technologies creates IoT interoperability with Locus Platform

Locus helps customers leverage data, analytical, cloud, and mobile capabilities via IoT-to-Locus SaaS platform

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 9 August 2016 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in cloud-based EHS software, announced today that its multi-tenant SaaS Platform fully interoperates with the Internet of Things (IoT). The company has been the pioneering innovator in the EHS software space since 1999 when it first introduced its Automation and Data Management Groups, which used Internet-based technologies to manage and control vast amounts of data generated at the company’s customer sites.

Locus’ automation technologies have evolved over the years to encompass the vast array of Internet-connected devices, sensors, programmable logic controllers, and other instruments to gather and organize large amounts of streaming data.

The IoT interconnects uniquely identifiable embedded computing, testing, and monitoring devices within the existing Internet infrastructure and software platform. Locus IoT services offer connectivity beyond machine-to-machine communications and cover a variety of protocols, domains, and applications.

“The IoT is one of the fastest-growing trends in tech. When applied to the environmental monitoring industry, there is an overwhelming influx of information that has to be dealt with; many companies are concerned that the sheer volume of data will render the information useless. For that reason, Locus invested in smart software and intelligent databases to deal with this new trend, long before IoT had a common name. We aspire to change the face of the environmental monitoring industry,” said Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus.

In any industry, when all incoming data are connected and centrally accessible through a multi-tenant SaaS application, the flow of information is much more efficient and effective. For example, instead of having a separate data collection protocol from software applications for water quality management, waste management, GHG management, EHS compliance and incident management, a company can have all emissions-related records—regardless of whether they originated in the laboratory, field, or Internet-connected monitoring device—in a single system of record. From this single system of record, they can manage compliance activities, perform data gathering and monitoring, manage water treatment systems remotely, and manage resources for sustainability reporting at the same time. Adopting such a structure offers Locus’ customers the ability to converge all incoming sources of information to create a much-needed integrated enterprise platform for EH&S+S management.

At the crux of this integration is Locus’ highly scalable and end-user configurable Locus Platform. The interoperability combines the Locus Platform as a service with its automation, mobile, and IoT platforms. The combined IoT suite will be hosted on Locus’ cloud.

“By combining our cloud platform and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to make them interoperable, we provide the single platform for our customers that helps them lower their operational costs, reduce cycle time, and ultimately become better stewards of the environment. This integration will give our customers more analytics from connected devices,” added Duplan.

Why SaaS multitenancy is key to successful and sustainable EHS management

A recently published survey by a research analyst firm indicates that 90 percent of EHS software applications installed today are single-tenant on customer premises or single-tenant, vendor hosted.  Only 10 percent are multitenant, vendor-hosted. In other words, most of the vendors in the EH&S space do not run a single version of their software maintained at one location. Instead, they run multiple copies at a single or multiple locations, with the high likelihood that these multiple copies are not alike, but instead represent multiple versions or contain specific customizations for individual customers. This model is crushing their growth and scalability potential.

Locus delivers EHS+S SaaS solutions as highly scalable, Software as a Service (SaaS) application and platform services on a multitenant technology architecture. Multitenancy is an architectural approach that allows Locus to operate a single application instance for multiple organizations, treating all customers as separate tenants who run in virtual isolation from each other. Customers can use and customize an application as though they each have a separate instance, yet their data and customizations remain secure and insulated from the activities of all other tenants. Locus multitenant services run on a single stack of hardware and software, which is comprised of commercially available hardware and a  combination of proprietary and commercially available software. As a result, Locus can spread the cost of delivering EHS SaaS services across user base, which lowers the cost for each customer. Also, because Locus does not have to manage thousands of distinct applications with their business logic and database schemas, we believe that we can scale our business faster than traditional software vendors. Moreover, we can focus our resources on building new functionality to deliver to customer base as a whole rather than on maintaining an infrastructure to support each of their distinct applications.

Multitenancy also allows for faster bug and security fixes, automatic software updates and the ability to deploy major releases and frequent, incremental improvements to Locus’ services, benefiting the entire user community. Our services are optimized to run on specific databases and operating systems using the tools and platforms best suited to serve customers rather than on-premise software that must be written to the different hardware, operating systems and database platforms existing within a customer’s unique systems environment. Locus developers build and support solutions and features on a single code base on our chosen technology platform. Locus efforts are focused on improving and enhancing the features, functionality, performance, availability and security of existing service offerings as well as developing new features, functionality, and services.

Locus customers and third-party developers can create apps rapidly because of the ease of use of Locus Platform and the benefits of a multitenant platform. Locus provides the capability for business users to configure applications easily to suit their specific needs.

Also, Locus multitenant cloud platform makes it possible to use a remarkably small number of servers as efficiently as possible. When organizations move business applications to Locus, they can significantly reduce their energy use and carbon footprints compared to traditional on-premises or single-tenant or ASP solutions

Locus built and maintains a multitenant application architecture that has been designed to enable service to scale securely, reliably and cost effectively. Locus’ multitenant application architecture maintains the integrity and separation of customer data while still permitting all customers to use the same application functionality simultaneously.

Both Locus and its data centers providers hold independent  AICPA SOC1 (SSAE16)  and SOC2 certification.

Locus Announces New Company President

J. Wesley Hawthorne promoted to President of Locus Technologies

San Francisco, Calif., 14 July 2016 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in SaaS environmental compliance and information management software, announced today the promotion of long time Locus employee J. Wesley Hawthorne to the position of President of Locus Technologies. Current President and CEO Neno Duplan will remain CEO. He will focus his energies on long-term strategic goals to ensure Locus remains a leading force within the EHS compliance and sustainability software industry.

Mr. Hawthorne has been an essential contributor to the success of Locus Technologies for the last 17 years. Mr. Hawthorne holds an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford and B.S. degrees in Geology and Geological Engineering from Purdue University. He is registered both as a Professional Engineer and Professional Geologist, and is accredited as Lead Verifier for greenhouse gas emissions by the California Air Resources Board.

Since 2014, Mr. Hawthorne has managed Locus’ operations and product development teams, including the launch of Locus Platform, a fully configurable multi-tenant software solution designed from the ground up to address modern EHS data management needs. His strong technical background, coupled with his keen business sense, will provide Locus with the outstanding leadership needed to navigate the dynamic and changing EHS software space.

“At Locus, it has been my privilege to work with some of the world’s leading companies and organizations, bringing cutting-edge technological solutions to address their EHS and sustainability compliance needs,” said Mr. Hawthorne. “I am very excited to take a leading role in continuing the growth of those products and services with one of the best development and configuration teams in the industry. Locus is well-positioned to become a dominant provider of EHS compliance software, thanks to our experienced staff and industry-tested platforms. I look forward to continuing to serve our existing customers with enhanced software solutions, and expanding our market reach in the GRC space with new and compelling software tools.”

Locus Technologies introduces indoor air management application

The Locus indoor air management application is fully integrated with the dynamic Locus Platform and will automate indoor air management for small and large enterprises.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 6 June 2016 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the leader in cloud-based environmental compliance and sustainability management software, introduces an all-new vapor intrusion and indoor air management application to its newest platform to redefine how companies organize, manage, and report their indoor air and vapor intrusion data. The Locus platform— a true, multi-tenant SaaS— offers a highly configurable, user-friendly interface to meet individual organizations’ environmental management needs.

Indoor air quality is becoming an important environmental and chemical exposure challenge for many companies whose properties may be impacted by contaminated groundwater or soil that release vapors or fumes.  Once the indoor air quality problem is identified, it follows a lengthy investigation that can involve several phases of sampling (including soil-gas, subslab, pathway, and ambient indoor air samples) using either active or passive sampling techniques. Samples are typically composited over time periods that can range from hours to weeks. A substantial amount of additional metadata is collected surrounding each sampling event, including information on the building construction, layout, occupancy, chemical use, and heating and ventilation systems.

All these activities generate large quantities of data, which until now were managed primarily by spreadsheet scattered on laptops or desktops. Locus’ new application brings an organized approach and workflow process to schedule, sample, and manage analytical results stemming from investigation and ongoing monitoring programs. Tools are also included to track the status and effectiveness of mitigation efforts related to indoor air quality. The data are easily summarized for review through reporting and built-in mapping tools, which can identify adjacent properties at potential risk for indoor air quality issues. Plus, if a customer is already a subscriber to Locus EIM, Incidents, or other Locus Platform applications, they can correlate data among various applications and facilitate finding the cause of degradation of the indoor air quality.

“Indoor air quality and vapor intrusion are gaining more and more attention from regulators, property owners, and managers of environmental sites. These projects generate a large volume of structured and unstructured data as part of the investigation and mitigation processes.  To successfully compile and review this information, companies need a software that can manage these various data types and allow quick review and decision making. The right software can reduce the stress, time, and potential inaccuracies associated with these projects.” said Wes Hawthorne, Senior Vice President of Locus.

Sarah Wright joins Locus Technologies as Director of Customer Success

Industry expert joins Locus in key customer-facing role

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 25 April 2016  — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in cloud-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced today the addition of Sarah Wright as their Director of Customer Success. Customer Success is a new role at Locus, and its main function is managing the technical and business relationships between Locus and its customers, with the intent of maximizing the value that customers derive from the Locus SaaS solutions. With EHS compliance and sustainability becoming more integrated at large enterprises, Locus hopes to broaden and deepen its relationships with existing and future customers across customers’ divisions and various regulatory domains by expanding its engagement.

Before joining Locus, Ms. Wright worked as a database implementation specialist, directing global and regional environmental data management software implementations. She has worked closely with Fortune 100 companies to ensure success with their environmental software projects for single and enterprise systems. In addition to implementations and targeted trainings, Sarah is an expert in software system audits and environmental data management needs assessments to ensure companies’ data management systems function optimally. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree from University of Illinois in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences.

In addition to her environmental data management expertise, she has also worked in many facets of the environmental industry including analytical laboratories, environmental regulatory agencies, and remediation consulting firms. Ms. Wright is also co-chair in the upcoming International Conference for Environmental Data Management (ICEDM), where environmental data management experts share knowledge on best practices.

“We are very pleased to have Sarah Wright join our team,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. “With her highly relevant domain background, environmental software experience, and her hands-on experience with enterprise customers, Ms. Wright will be a key customer-facing member of the Locus team to ensure customers are maximizing the power of their Locus solutions and making each implementation a success. She will lead and quality check customer implementations to ensure that solutions are performing optimally and correctly.”

EHS and Sustainability Software: Just say no to on-premises deployments

I recently reviewed an article published by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2012 titled “Bessemer’s Top 10 Laws of Cloud Computing”. I wanted to check how accurate their predictions on the Cloud computing were four years later. It is amazing how well they predicted market trends and how the 10 Laws of Cloud Computing still hold today. Nowhere is this more important than in my industry of environmental, health, and safety and sustainability software that is still struggling with a definition of cloud computing and hoping that their legacy system somehow will help them deal with avalanches of data stemming from EHS compliance and sustainability management activities. They will not.  I repeat here an introductory paragraph from the original 10 Laws of Cloud Computing. The whole article can be viewed or downloaded from here.

“Although this is finally becoming more widely accepted as a best practice, we must still emphasize the importance of building a single instance, multi-tenant product, with a single version of code in production. “Just say no!” to on-premises deployments. Multi-instance, single tenant offerings should only apply to legacy software companies moving to a dedicated hosting model because they don’t have the luxury of an architectural redesign. Of course it is possible to use virtualization to provide multiple instances, but this hybrid strategy will make your engineering team much more expensive and much less nimble.”

“A large part of the momentum around Cloud Computing today is because IT departments now realize they can avoid many of (these) implementation headaches and functionality shortcomings, and instead get the best of both worlds by working with best-of-breed vendors. Cloud Computing provides the opportunity to leverage best-of-breed application offerings, with the standardization and pre-integration of many of the applications and APIs.  You can pick the world’s best application for every need, every user, and every business case.  You can deploy exactly the number of seats you need, where and when you need them.”

Locus has been awarded by the Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) for a tenth year running!

Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) Recognizes Firms for Growth and Innovation in 2015

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwired – February 02, 2016) — Locus Technologies announced today that Environmental Business Journal (EBJ), a business research publication which provides high value strategic business intelligence to the environmental industry, granted the company the 2015 award for Information Technology in the environmental and sustainability industry for the tenth year running.

Locus was recognized for continuing its strategic shift to configurable Multitenant pure Software as a Service (SaaS) EHS solutions and welcoming new, high profile customers. In 2015 Locus scored record revenue from Cloud software with annual growth over 20 percent. Locus also achieved a record renewal rate of 99 percent and signed up new customers including Shell Oil Company, Philips 66, Ameresco, California Dairies, Cemex, Frito-Lay, Genentech, Lockheed Martin, PPG Industries, United Airlines and US Pipe & Foundry. Locus also became the largest provider of SaaS environmental software to the commercial nuclear industry; currently over 50 percent of U.S. nuclear generating capacity uses Locus’ flagship product. Locus’ configurable Locus Platform gained momentum in 2015 with new implementations in the manufacturing, agricultural and energy sectors, including a major contract with Sempra Energy for greenhouse gas management and reporting.

“Locus continues to influence the industry with its forward-thinking product set, pure SaaS architecture, and eye for customer needs,” said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI), publisher of Environmental Business Journal.

“We are very proud and honored to receive the prestigious EBJ Information Technology award in environmental business for a tenth time. We feel it is a testament to our unwavering commitment and dedication to accomplish this level of recognition, especially now as we lead the market by providing robust solutions for the emerging space of cloud and mobile-based environmental information management,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus Technologies.

The 2015 EBJ awards will be presented at a special ceremony at the Environmental Industry Summit XIV in San Diego, Calif. on March 9-11, 2016. The Environmental Industry Summit is an annual three-day executive retreat hosted by EBI Inc.

New Environmental Monitoring Technology Keeping the Air We Breathe Under an Unprecedented Level of Scrutiny

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times discussed advances in environmental monitoring technologies. Rising calls to create cleaner air and limit climate change are driving a surge in new technology for measuring air emissions and other pollutants — a data revolution that is opening new windows into the micro-mechanics of environmental damage. Data stemming from these new monitoring technologies coupled with advances in data management (Big Data) and Internet of Things (IOT) as discussed in my article “Keeping  the Pulse of the Planet: Using Big Data to Monitor Our Environment” published last year, is creating all new industry and bringing much needed transparency to environmental degradation. Real time monitoring of  radioactive emissions at any point around globe or water quality data are slowly becoming a reality.

According to the article author William Yardley, “the momentum for new monitoring tools is rooted in increasingly stringent regulations, including California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions, and newly tightened federal standards and programs to monitor drought and soil contamination. A variety of clean-tech companies have arisen to help industries meet the new requirements, but the new tools and data are also being created by academics, tinkerers and concerned citizens — just ask Volkswagen, whose deceptive efforts to skirt emissions-testing standards were discovered with the help of a small university lab in West Virginia.”

“Taking it all into account, the Earth is coming under an unprecedented new level of scrutiny.”

“There are a lot of companies picking up on this, but who is interested in the data — to me, that’s also fascinating,” said Colette Heald, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We’re in this moment of a huge growth in curiosity — of people trying to understand their environment. That coincides with the technology to do something more.”

The push is not limited to measuring air and emissions. Tools to sample soil, air emissions, produced water, waste management, monitor water quality, test ocean acidity and improve weather forecasting are all on the rise. Drought has prompted new efforts to map groundwater and stream flows and their water quality across the West.

Two of key issues that need to be addressed are validity of data stemming from new instruments and sensors for enforcement purposes and where is all (big) data be stored and how accessible it will be. The first question will be answered as new hand-held data collection instrumentation, sensors, and devices undergo testing and accreditation by governmental agencies. The second issue, a big data, has already been solved by companies like Locus Technologies that has been aggregating massive amounts of environmental monitoring data in its cloud-based EIM (Environmental Information Management) software.

As the article put it: “When the technology is out there and everyone starts using it, the question is, how good is the data? If the data’s not high enough quality, then we’re not going to make regulatory decisions based on that. Where is this data going to reside in 10 years, when all these sensors are out there, and who’s going to [manage] that information? Right now it’s kind of organic so there’s no centralized place where all of this information is going.”

However, the private industry and some Government organizations like Department of Energy (DOE) are already preparing for these new avalanches of data that are hitting their corporate networks and are using Locus cloud to organize and report increased volume of monitoring information stemming from their facilities and other monitoring networks.

Locus makes ENR TOP 200 Environmental Firms as the only EHS Software company