SAN FRANCISCO - The technology firms crmOrbit and salesforce.com have announced the availability of energyOrbit on the salesforce.com system. Businesses are offered incentives from utility companies to retrofit their facilities with energy-efficient equipment; energyOrbit enables energy-efficiency professionals to determine savings and incentives applicable to industry and state incentive program standards. Built using the Apex on-demand platform, energyOrbit is available for test drive and deployment at www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

Using energyOrbit, energy-efficiency professionals can inventory energy-consuming equipment such as lighting, HVAC, and refrigeration in commercial buildings. Once the inventory, account information, rate schedule, and other essential data is gathered, energyOrbit is used to analyze the data and make retrofit or replacement recommendations for energy savings and green house gas (GHG) emissions reduction. Based on these analyses, energyOrbit computes incentives/rebates provided by utility companies that would be applied to the project cost.

"Collaboration with our customers has been a key factor in the development and propagation of energyOrbit," said Udi Merhav, founder of crmOrbit Inc. "We were commissioned by several private and government-sponsored energy agencies to build an on-demand application and building it on salesforce.com's Apex platform was a natural fit. State governments continuously introduce incentive and rebate programs to promote conservation in areas such as water, natural gas, electricity, and solar energy. Built on the Apex on-demand platform, energyOrbit is easily flexible and extensible to allow for quick deployments of additional energy savings measurements."

The Small Business Energy Alliance (SBEA) based in Sonoma, Calif., has been using energyOrbit to run its business auditing operations. "Prior to deploying energyOrbit we were locked into the quagmire of a legacy database. At a cost of $20,000 to develop this database and endless maintenance costs, our production volume was severely compromised," said Ken Moore, program manager for SBEA. "We wanted something that our field staff could use from any location and we did not want to be at the mercy of IT requirements. We needed a reliable tool that we can easily change as business requirements change and as new standards for incentives and rebates are published from PG&E."

"energyOrbit demonstrates the power of the Apex on-demand platform and the AppExchange in quickly building, customizing, and delivering an application that addressees the specific needs of the energy conservation industry," said Matt Holleran, vice president, AppExchange partners, salesforce.com. "Thousands of salesforce.com customers can use the AppExchange to take advantage of the innovation of the on-demand industry to help them run their businesses."

For more information, visit www.salesforce.com.

Publication date: 01/29/2007