Getting a little green into your PC network is a good thing. And Verdiem can get you there. This Microsoft .NET Framework-based company develops power management software for PC networks. Its SURVEYOR software provides measurable energy and cost savings, simplified and automated management of PC power options, and painless implementation that comes with minimal maintenance and a rapid payback. The development of SURVEYOR was funded in part by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, and the software is approved as a conservation measure by utilities and power producers throughout North America. Verdiem is a recognized partner in the EPA’s EnergyStar program and was recently awarded Premier Partner status in the U.S. Department of Energy's Rebuild America program. And in April 2008, it was recognized as a "Hot Company to Watch in 2008" by Forrester Research.
Here is our conversation with Jerry Barber, CTO at Verdiem.
Microsoft Startup Zone: Give me the quick 30,000-foot overview on Verdiem. We get the green concept, but how did this company evolve?
Jerry Barber: It goes back to 2001 when the wife of one of our founders was working for a school system, and they were getting very worried about the power consumption that all the PCs in the district were consuming since they were left on all the time. They had made some efforts to try to turn them off, but that didn't work. Our founder knew there had to be a way to solve this, and Verdiem was born. Our initial target market focused on managing costs at school systems, state and local governments, that sort of thing.
But about a year and a half ago, enterprises got very interested in not only managing their costs but also managing their carbon footprint, and doing something green. We found that the Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies really started showing up on the radar as customers of ours or future customers wanting to deploy our technology. And we’ve grown quickly since then.
MSUZ: So what is the Microsoft angle here, and why and when did you first choose the Microsoft platform?
Barber: Clearly, Microsoft was the largest PC platform. And they were a very large consumer of energy as well. We were going after the low-hanging fruit in terms of being able to reduce power consumption. If you look at the actual statistics of where the power goes in an IT organization, 40 percent goes to desktop machines. Everybody thinks most power consumption is from the datacenter, but the datacenter is only responsible for 22 to 23 percent. So the biggest opportunity we saw was on the desktop. And that’s where the Microsoft infrastructure and tools are in place to centrally manage PCs. We knew it was here that we could bring the most value to IT organizations, and do it fast.
MSUZ: You built your solution based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and other technologies?
Barber: We used a combination of .NET and specifically Visual C# and C++.
MSUZ: Any one technology that has been most critical to your success and business model?
Barber: Not in terms of technology. Obviously, a critical part of the model was within the Windows operating system and being able to expose the APIs for managing power schemes. That allows us to control how long the monitor should be on before it switches off, and how long the computer should be on before it goes into sleep—and ultimately that enables us to put in the infrastructure to control that remotely. Some of the other technologies that we've used are the object technologies in the Office environment. These give us the ability to programmatically manipulate Office applications. As an example, we can go in when it’s time to shut the computer down, and check to see if there are any documents that haven't been saved, and if there are, we can actually save them before we shut down the computer.
MSUZ: What have been the overall key quantifiable benefits of using Microsoft technologies?
Barber: It obviously offers a full suite of development tools that allows us to integrate and work with the operating system at fairly low levels. One of the things that we do is try to determine how much power in watts the machine is actually consuming. One of the ways we do that is by using the WMI interface and looking at the actual components that make up the machine. And then based on the usage patterns that we see on the machine, such as the users typing of the keyboard, the CPU running at this speed, we see disk I/O bandwidth like this or network I/O bandwidth, we can then calculate how much power the machine is actually using. So, I think the fact that the whole environment exposes a lot of its components in ways that allow us to put together a lot of information to determine the power usage in the machine is a big advantage for us.
MSUZ: Tell us a little about your business model?
Barber: With our current business model, we sell software, both a client and a server, that is installed behind the firewall in global 2000 corporations. We are working on a SaaS model as well.
MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support/want to integrate/use in the future, and why?
Barber: We're doing a lot of C# work, and we're doing work with Web services as well. One of the things we use fairly extensively is SQL Server—it’s at the core of our product, as is SQL Server Express in some cases. The reporting services have given us a quick way to enable customers to generate reports. And with SQL Server, we collect a lot of data, and SQL Server is really an enterprise class and very fast database system. It provides us with the scalability we’ll need as we grow.
MSUZ: If you had to do it over again now, would you still pick Microsoft as a platform for your solution?
Barber: Yes, absolutely.
One last point to mention. Microsoft has been a tremendous supporter of our efforts, and their whole tool suite has been very useful and very popular with our customers. We’ve integrated our administration tools for Surveyor with SCCM, formally known as SMS, and that's the Microsoft administration console, and that's been extremely popular with our customers, and it makes the task of administering a very large Surveyor installation very easy.
Jerry Barber's Background
Jerry Barber is an expert in Web services architectures. He began his technology career at the University of Idaho, earning a BSEE and a BA in Math, and an MSEE degree. Following graduation, he wrote one of the first Basic interpreters for the Intel 8008 chip while working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Barber has also earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed the Stanford Executive Program.
After completing his post-doctoral work at INRIA (France's national institute for research in computer sciences) he returned to MIT as a research scientist where he co-founded Gold Hill Computers, which adapted artificial intelligence applications to the then-new IBM PC. He was also a co-founder of the Object Management Group that defined the CORBA specification for interoperable enterprise applications. Barber later became a founding member of a second standards-setting consortium, the Digital Imaging Group.
Following his work at MIT, he joined Aldus Corporation as director of advanced products and then became CTO. When Aldus merged with Adobe, Jerry became director of technology integration and later became Adobe's senior director of core technologies. He also co-founded PhotoAccess Technologies, which evolved into an Internet-base. digital image-processing firm that was then acquired by PhotoWorks. There he served as vice president of engineering and IT.
Most recently, before joining Verdiem, Barber worked with DocuSign, developing the company's technology, infrastructure, and engineering capabilities to efficiently manage growth.
For more information on Verdiem, read Yi-Jian Ngo’s blog post, “Green Power Management."
