Who you gonna call? These guys aren’t Ghostbusters, but they do believe they’ve discovered how to banish the spectre of industrial wastefulness

The have impressive  investment credentials (backed by Kleiner Perkins’ legendary VC John Doerr) and they have impressive green credentials (Al Gore) and they have an idea called ‘Organisational Metabolism’.
It’s all made much clearer in this video (it’s an excellent video in terms of content, but the sound and image quality are less than ideal: don’t worry though, the video below it is more recent and much more professionally produced, but personally I think the first video is actually better).

Here’s another video (posted online 1st of July 2010):

Here’s what the company had to say about itself when it launched its solution in a press release (BusinessWire 1st of June 2009):

Hara Unveils Environmental and Energy Management Solution for the Post-Carbon Economy

Hara, the company dedicated to helping organizations grow and profit without depleting the earth’s resources, today unveiled HaraTM Environmental and Energy Management (Hara EEM), a comprehensive software as a service solution which enables organizations to holistically monitor and manage their natural resource consumption and environmental impact.

Hara EEM gives customers auditable transparency and control over their organizational metabolism (OM) – the collective resources consumed and expended by an organization – including energy, fossil fuels, water, waste, carbon, and other resources.

Funded in 2008 by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Hara is enabling customers to identify millions of dollars in savings from energy, water and waste abatement strategies.

“Our vision is to enable a post-carbon economy in which organizations can grow and profit without depleting the earth’s resources”

 

“Effective environmental management requires good insight, good analysis and good data,” said Bryan Jacob, Director of Energy Management and Climate Protection for The Coca-Cola Company.

“We have been pleased to collaborate with Hara in the development of its Energy & Environmental Management solution – an application that combines data collection with mitigation planning and initiative tracking in a comprehensive package that enables us to improve energy efficiency and environmental impact.”

More than a dozen organizations, including The Coca-Cola Company and the City of Palo Alto, are already using Hara EEM to improve their operational efficiency, maximize shareholder value and manage risks while keeping up with changing externalities including pricing for commodities such as energy and pending regulation on a global scale.

Companies with a commitment to sustainability have outperformed their peers by 10 to 15 percent*.

A perfect storm of business imperatives – environmental, economic, and regulatory – is requiring private and public sector organizations to act now.

To date, while the imperatives are clear, most organizations have been without a transparent and auditable way to address these challenges.

Hara provides a comprehensive solution to manage the environmental record, and prioritize and track reduction and cost savings initiatives that are both achievable and auditable under current or future regulations.

“Energy efficiency has never been more critical to corporate performance – directly in terms of bottom line costs but also indirectly in terms of related emissions from non-green energy sources,” said Dr. Stephen Stokes, Vice President of Sustainability and Green Technologies at AMR Research.

 

“Tracking, analyzing and optimizing energy usage and emission outputs from economic entities is a crucial, additional, new class of enterprise information which will drive future operational and performance excellence.”

About Hara Environmental and Energy Management (Hara EEM)

Hara EEM is a highly-configurable, software as a service (SaaS) application that quickly adapts to customer needs.

Available since January 2009 on a subscription basis and already in use by more than a dozen customers, Hara EEM is comprised of the following application modules:

•Discover – Aggregate environmental record information from relevant data sources in order to provide a comprehensive view of resource consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental impact.

•Plan – Define strategies, optimize planning decisions, forecast reductions, identify objectives and metrics, and calculate timing and benefits for each initiative.

•Act – Manage the execution of environmental and energy programs, track results per initiative, and create an audit trail for any current or future regulatory requirements.

•Innovate – Implement the Hara methodology and leverage best practices for continuous improvements and business transformation.

 

“Our vision is to enable a post-carbon economy in which organizations can grow and profit without depleting the earth’s resources,” said Amit Chatterjee, CEO and co-founder of Hara.

“Together with our customers, we have the opportunity to write the encyclopedia of environmental efficiency, creating an unprecedented body of knowledge that will influence environmental impact reduction initiatives for years to come.”

About Hara

Hara helps organizations grow and profit while optimizing natural resource consumption and reducing environmental impact.

Hara gives customers auditable transparency and control of their organizational metabolism – the collective resources consumed and expended by an organization – including energy, water, waste, carbon and other resources.

Hara was funded in 2008 by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Its leadership and advisory teams have a strong track record of environmental and enterprise software expertise and hail from companies including Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, and McKinsey and institutions including Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Hara is based in Menlo Park, CA.

For more information, please visit www.hara.com.