Ivy hunts energy-saving VARs
Energy-saving technology vendor begins quest for UK partners
Ivy Energy Saving has claimed its new technology, PowerWarden, can create a return on investment within six months, as it gears up for a reseller recruitment drive.
It already has a reference site, Somerset Council, which is saving £60,000 a year on its electricity bills.
Speaking on the eve of a recruitment drive for 50 new reseller partners, sales and marketing director Gary Andersen-Jones was bullish about the easy incremental earning this software could bring to resellers and system builders.
The beauty of this product was the simplicity of the proposition, he said. Most companies want to save on their power bills, but they cannot get their staff to co-operate. The products available, such as Windows Power Management, need a little fine tuning. This is where Ivy wants resellers to introduce PowerWarden.
“It is an easy product to install. It has got a tiny footprint and it works with Windows to automate power saving,” Anderson-Jones said. “With the best will in the world, IT managers cannot get their staff to power down their PCs when they are not using them. But this product can.”
Some councils even try bribing staff to turn their machines off at night, he reported.
But despite the widespread awareness of global warming, and the job saving pressure on staff to save money for their employer, the majority of users in a big organisation will still leave their machines on permanently. Ivy Energy will give resellers a cheaper and more effective solution to offer clients than bribing lazy end users, he argued.
Grants from local authorities, such as those from the London Development Agency under the Greening Your Business initiative, could make the business proposition even more compelling, he argued.
“The average Pentium 4 based machine, running idle overnight, will cost a business around £35 a year and a dual-core machine nearly double that,” said Andersen-Jones. In a company of 100 people, the extra cost of people leaving their PCs on over lunch time would be £500 a year, he argued.
Ivy Energy is offering potential partners a reseller kit including sample licences, demo kit and metering technology that helps quantify to clients the potential savings to be made.