Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. I have a special guest on the show today, Amit. Amit, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Hello everyone out in GreenMonk TV land. This is Amit Chatterjee, the CEO of Hurrah Software. The easiest way to remember how to pronounce our company is Hip Hip Hooray. Amit, Hurrah Software, a new start-up company. You've kind of de-cloaked to use Star Trek lingo in the last two weeks or so I guess. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Hurrah? I know you are a carbon software company but that's a very high level interpretation of what you guys do. Actually, we're a little bit more than a carbon software company, Tom, but it's a great question to ask. Hurrah focuses on helping companies find ways to drive operational efficiency and mitigate business risk associated with the consumption of natural resources. Now while everyone has spent a lot of time focused on carbon, it's equally important to remember that solid waste, wastewater also drive down companies' efficiency. So our job is to essentially help the company get healthier. We essentially take this similar to the akin model of what in the fitness world would be known as the BMI, the Body Mass Index. We've actually pushed out the concept of an Organizational Metabolism Index. While I'm probably not the best spokesperson for BMIs, I am one of the best spokespeople for OMIs. That's essentially finding a way to help an organization measure the inputs, as well as the outputs of their organization, and manage them more effectively. The bottom line is, the company becomes healthier, the organization sees less waste, both in terms of water, carbon footprint, as well as solid waste. If I have a company and I'm implementing your software, where am I going to get the inputs to put into your software?
2:01Is it going to be programmatic or do I have to sit in front of a spreadsheet and put them in? That's a great question, Tom. A lot of times customers are always thinking about how do I get the most accurate version of my inputs? And my inputs are defined as fossil fuels, energy, electricity, water, raw natural resources, materials used to build your product or service. All of those things reside in different parts of your organization, be it in your utility metering, be it inside your EH&S systems, be it inside sometimes the water meters, and oftentimes it's in production accounting software. So there's an opportunity to aggregate a complete picture. We partner with a lot of companies that enable us to help aggregate the complete picture very early on around designing the solution for organizations. There's going to be then an integration process bedding in your software where you, I assume your software can suck in information from lots of different systems, yeah? Absolutely. I mean, there's definitely, you know, we have four modules for the software that customers can engage with. And in the event that they're not fully aware of how big the scope of their problem is, our Discover module will help them do that, either it be manual, Excel-based, or integration software, which we work on. And we use a several variety of technologies that allow us to pull data from other systems. But more importantly, generally, once you have a picture of what you want to do and somebody tells you that your greenhouse gas emissions are 10 or your water footprint is 10, you want to find a way to reduce that as soon as possible. That's where our next three modules come in. Plan, act, and innovate. Plan is essentially the forecasting element that allows companies to define what are the leverage opportunities, where they can truly drive cost savings, operational efficiency for their organization, relative to the investment of where they started
4:05in terms of their natural resource consumption. The action part actually allows them to then look at the equivalent of an abatement curve, finding the low-level quick wins that have high degrees of ROI versus and balancing out longer-term strategies such as converting to solar or eliminating a particular power plant that is inefficient or waiting for a machine that's ending its depreciation cycle and upgrading it. The last piece that's equally important is the innovate piece. What Hara has focused on very, very, very, very disciplined in the stealth process was building an innovative compendium of alternative technologies. We like to classify that as the first written record of how effective alternative technologies are working either through best practices or through benchmarks or through, more importantly, user-rated community features. That allows customers to start to experiment with technologies and provide information back to the organizations as to how well a particular technology works for them, or more importantly, how that could be published across other landscape of facilities that look like that customer. What are your guys' backgrounds? I mean, where do you get the expertise for this kind of stuff? Pardon me. We got this expertise from a variety of sources. Several members of our team come from the carbon environmental legislative backgrounds. One of our colleagues spent eight years at the UN negotiating the Kyoto Protocol. Another has EU background around the actual carbon management trading capabilities. Others have science degrees in the PhD in physics or environmental sciences that allow us to really come and accurately do this. Secondarily, there's a set of very strong world-class software team members, people who've been co-founders of TIBCO Systems, been leading edge software developers at SAP or Oracle or Siebel or PeopleSoft, to demonstrate the ability to actually productize a business process application
6:07that cuts across an organization and allows you to create a business process where there previously hadn't been one. Secondly, our board of advisors is a world-class set of people. We have a Nobel Prize winner, Ed Rubin, who helps us think about climate change policy at a very broad scope. Arpad Forbath, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the leading thinkers around carbon lifecycle analysis, and the list goes on. And we're constantly looking to work and collaborate with the leading academic institutions because we know that one of the key elements for us is to always be on the cutting edge, not bleeding edge, but cutting edge of where environmental sciences are maturing and bring that into organizations as soon as possible. Arpad Forbath Your typical client or customer company, they're not going to be the mom and pop shops at the end of the road. You announced when you launched some extremely interesting companies. Do you want to talk a bit about that? Arpad Forbath Yeah, absolutely, Tom. You know, I would say that one of the things that's unique about the infrastructure we've chosen is we've gone with a very cutting edge, you know, 2007 infrastructure that's allowed us to sort of take advantage of the software as a service model deployment. It allows us to actually enable companies as large as the Coca-Cola company to be able to help them deploy globally instantly the product and have very quick ROI starting to use the product as soon as possible. But to your point about mom and pop shops, we can also work with smaller organizations. The city of Palo Alto, a community of about 60,000 residents, was actually able to leverage the software and find success as well. Now, while the Coca-Cola organization provides probably one of the more interesting stories in terms of brand recognition and value, I think one of the other
8:09stories that Haraw would like to also promote is the fact that a municipality with its limited budget was able to find value and drive ROI in three months from the software, but more importantly, find $800,000 of cost savings around energy abatement and additional savings of greenhouse gas emissions reductions by about 5%. So there's a lot of quick ROI savings as well as, as the way we like to put it, lay off energy, don't lay off jobs. And it's, I assume because it's a zero install software as a service delivered application, it's a, it's a service based sign up fee as well. It's not a license fee or maybe it's a combination of the two. No, you're absolutely correct. What we allow the customer to do is based upon the number of modules licensed and how many facilities they've deployed against, they then have a monthly subscription that they are then charged. Super. Okay. Amit, it sounds like a really, really interesting project and kudos to you guys for, for pulling it off. Thank you very much. And it's a very exciting time to be helping companies think through the process of laying off energy versus laying off jobs.