I had planned to get away without having to write a predictions blog this year, but my topic for this week's blog, turns out to also be a prediction.
The Prediction:
Energy and environmental optimization (a.k.a. sustainability), will become a massive industry beginning in 2010. Both enterprises, SMBs and consumers will be actively looking to manage costs, comply with regulations and become good environmental citizens by optimizing energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, recycling, composting, water use, telecommuting, etc.
COROLLARY 1:
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) will play a central role in making energy and environmental optimization accessible, affordable and possible.
COROLLARY 2:
The user experience of the sustainability service offering will determine which solutions actually succeed in the marketplace.
I've been meeting with many VC firms, investors, and industry leaders in the Valley and it is readily apparent to me that sustainability is a topic on everyone's mind and and a business opportunity on which many startups and established players will focus over the next 5-10 years.
The motivations are very compelling:
- Energy and commodity costs will continue to increase and companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production to lower costs across internal operations and the connected supply chain. (As one colleague put it: "The days of cutting costs via off-shoring are coming to an end. Resource optimization is the future for achieving cost savings").
- Environmental regulation will certainly increase and companies will need to document, track and report their compliance for emissions and waste reductions (as well as potentially monetize their reduced carbon emissions)
- Consumers are becoming aware of and requesting information on corporate sustainability efforts. Brand value will depend on providing transparency into sustainability initiatives.
Sustainability applications will be SaaS
Clearly, companies (both large and small) are already on the move to decrease large expenditures on in-house projects and software installations with a fifth of all enterprises planning to have no internal IT assets by 2012. Instead the move is to cloud computing and SaaS - with no software to install or maintain or upgrade.
So it is a no-brainer to predict that on-premise solutions for sustainability will be rare. Instead businesses (and consumers) will be looking for SaaS solutions that can be easily accessed by employees from desktops, laptops or smartphones.
Since SaaS is inherently "connected in the cloud", a sustainability service can be effectively designed across organizational boundaries, incorporating the entire extended enterprise - partners, suppliers and customers.
Success depends on much time people devote to use
The other no-brainer is that user experience will make or break these SaaS applications. They key to making sustainability applications work, is how compelling and easy they are for users to enter information, how well they are on-boarded, and how easy it is track the impact (visually including mapping, as well as numerically). The user interface should be designed around a clear conceptual model, high value scenarios with desktop levels of performance using RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).
I'll write more about the sustainability topic in the future, but if you were wondering what the application design crystal ball holds for 2010 (and beyond), think SaaS-based energy and environmental optimization software with a compelling cross-device user interface.
Categories: SaaS, Sustainability, User Experience