CloudApps is all for helping businesses manage and, more importantly, reduce their carbon footprints with its Sustainability Suite and widget style app.

The cloud based Sustainability Suite is a comprehensive set of tools designed to record, manage and analyse a company's carbon footprint. This is backed up by a friendly and colourful widget style application dubbed Sustainability Momentum, or Sumo.

The idea behind Sumo is to motivate employees to get involved in helping to reduce their company's energy use and waste. The target for individuals is a score of one or below.

A set of six buttons informs and gives actions to the user via a slide-out box below the widget, with the user score displayed in the middle.

Three buttons above this number inform the user of their carbon footprint and even forecast whether they will hit or miss their target.

The three buttons below suggest how the employee can meet their target along with the ability to make their own suggestions which can be voted on.

The slider bar to the right is effectively a ranking system which can be displayed in different levels between, say, a small team of people, departments or an entire building. It shows the rank and whether the person or group is trending up or down.

Lastly, the slide out page to the left displays a customisable message from the CEO with the visions and goals of the company.

The Sumo widget is graphically nice, and easy to use. The ranking system definitely introduces a nice element of competition to help employees engage and look to reduce their carbon footprints. Perhaps an incentive scheme would help this further.

22 Apr 2011