Today Groom Energy published our newly updated ECA research report, 2010 Enterprise Carbon Accounting, which also included our selections for the market’s 2010 ECA Emerging Leaders.

The basis for our research report started back in 2006.  At that time, as Groom Energy engineers were working with a F500 customer to build a GHG reduction budget, it occured to us that GHG tracking and reporting would eventually represent a fundamentally new process within every large company.  Even by then, staying on top of reporting for the EPA’s Climate Leaders was requiring more and more time for our customers.  It was no surprise that spreadsheet tools were not going to scale – but it was the collaboration necessary to even gather and manage the data where the gap was most obvious.

What most people don’t know is that we even made a concerted effort to start our own Groom Energy spin-out GHG software company.  We had surveyed the market through our customers, found only a few third party software packages, and thought we saw a path to a new class of enterprise software, calling it “enterprise carbon accounting” or ECA for short.    (all new markets need a name, right?)

Within a few months we had detailed the basic software functionality and even recruited a software team to start building it.  After several initial meetings with traditional software VC’s in Boston (most of whom couldn’t spell G-H-G, but all of whom understood enterprise software) we sensed it was going to be a long slog to get early stage funding based on our powerpoint-ware.  Either we had bad breath, couldn’t convey the opportunity correctly or needed to live on Sand Hill Road…

Within a few months of our effort we starting uncovering more new ECA vendors, some established EHS vendors with GHG extensions, some VC funded pure start ups, some larger software companies who added GHG modules.  It seemed each week we were adding a new entrant to our wiki list, which was more and more daunting.  At 10 known players we were concerned.  At 20, we knew were were too late and abandoned our effort.  At 30, we knew that our customers were just as overwhelmed trying to understand the offerings, all while building their own strategies internally.

And hence the idea for our ECA research report was born.  We saw that the best way to leverage our effort was to help our customers with a more concrete deliverable – customer based research which could be regularly updated as the market developed.  Not as profound as an entirely new company, but worthwhile nonetheless.  The good news is that market response has been a bit overwhelming…

Check out the latest report and, if you’re an entrepreneur considering your own ECA software start up, study the vendor list carefully – its up to 60 and still going….