On a visit from the UK to attend Green IT, Russia’s first ever greentech event which took place yesterday in Moscow, Sparxent CEO Ashley Leonard shared with East-West Digital News his vision of the trends for power management solutions around the world and in Russia.
Sparxent subsidiary Verismic has developed power management solutions to reduce the energy consumption of PCs. Could you update our readers on today’s technological and business trends around the world in the area of PC energy consumption?
The PC and server power management software market is set to expand nearly fivefold from $168 million in 2010 to $783 million annually by 2015, according to a new report from Pike Research. The cleantech market intelligence firm forecasts that PC power management software alone could be saving almost 47 MTCO2e of emissions by 2015, equivalent to taking nearly 8 million cars off the road.
What sort of concrete results can a company expect from using these solutions?
Well, with rising energy costs and a slowing economy, many organizations have found smart and innovative ways to make operations more efficient and reduce overhead. These initiatives often have the beneficial side effect of reducing ecological footprint too, in the case of Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District: they expect to save 3.9 million kilowatt hours, 3,670 tons of carbon dioxide, and roughly $300,000 a year through the implementation of Verismic Power Manager on their 10,000 PC’s.
What is Verismic’s specific value added? How do its solutions differentiate themselves?
Verismic Power Manager (VPM) was designed from the ground-up to deliver PC power management, and in what has become a very crowded market-place. A notable difference of VPM is the multiple delivery options available: on premise, hosted in the cloud and as a managed service. On an actual technology level – function and performance – our product is unique in the sheer number of languages and monetary currencies that it understands. It sounds simple, but this is crucial if you want to calculate how many dollars or rubles you are saving! Additionally, Dynamic Efficiency acts as the intelligent ‘engine management’ of the systems, ‘throttling back’ to reduce power consumption when users or applications are idle, but immediately and automatically ‘throttling up’ when performance is required.
The effectiveness of any environmental or efficiency initiative comes down to the ‘user population’ – The User Education & Awareness capabilities within VPM keep users informed of their personal contribution to PC energy efficiency.
VPM also enables other areas of the business to promote efficiency and environmental initiatives that go beyond just PC power management.
You came here to take part in Green IT, a conference that took place yesterday here in Moscow. Why are you interested in the Russian market?
Many commentators would question Russia and its environmental awareness and its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. At Green IT conference, we ran a survey of attendees to try and better understand individual and company attitudes to PC power management. We ran the same survey in the UK last month, so it will be interesting to make a country comparison.
Without wanting to presume the results of that survey, I personally believe there is a real appetite for PC power management across large organizations in Russia. Earlier this year, we presented Verismic software and our products at Arbyte’s annual user conference and this has lead to some immediate sales opportunities with some well known Russian organizations. So whilst no new venture is guaranteed to be successful, I am very confident business for us here is going to be great.
Generally speaking, how does Russia look to you as a place for doing business? Do you perceive the Russian market as one that’s easy to penetrate, or more difficult than other markets?
In terms of setting up business here, we have found it to be slightly easier than other ‘non Western’ regions. Two years ago, Sparxet Inc. – Verismic Software’s parent company – acquired Russian server, storage and PC/workstation manufacturer Arbyte.
Whilst Verismic will be extending its presence in the country, all Verismic business will be delivered via Arbyte’s direct sales team and its 70 specialised IT partners. We are confident of strong growth over the next 12 months.
We will be extending our own presence here and will shortly be opening our own offices within Arbyte’s headquarters in Moscow. Arbyte already has a great reputation in Russia and through its own direct sales team and its 70 plus partners our chances of success here are greatly increased.
We are also planning to introduce products that are specific to the Russian market. At Green IT, Arbyte announced a new line of PCs, a green PC. Verismic Power Manager will be pre-installed on all green PC machines – that is how serious we are about this market and how confident we are that it will be successful.
• Ashley Leonard is the CEO of Sparxent, the parent company of Verismic Software. With 20 years experience as a technology entrepreneur, Ashley specializes in providing leadership during critical high-growth stages of emerging technology companies. Ashley is responsible for the management of Verismic Software Globally, implementing its growth plans, technology roadmap and sales and partner strategies.
