From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Today when a prospect is evaluating vendors, are you always at the table?

Neno Duplan: The majority of the time we are. We use guerrilla marketing to our advantage now. A lot of the companies in our space assumed they were the market leaders and they put a lot of money into advertising campaigns to essentially build awareness of the environmental management, energy management and carbon management. What they did not realize is that companies like us have been doing this for 10 years, so we just let them build overall awareness, and then we compete against them for actual contracts.

Each time we see a story in a major publication, we follow up and tell that publisher that we exist, that we have been doing this for 10 years, and show them our client list. That approach has gotten us a lot of mileage because often those publications were under the impression that companies like us did not exist. We have also received a lot of press from analysts like Gartner. That provides us a degree of credibility and demonstrates to the world that we are not just a mom-and-pop shop.

Sramana Mitra: Who were some of the early adopters of your software product?

Neno Duplan: Honeywell was one of the first. They are a global technology company, and we organized all of their environmental information at thousands of sites around the world. In 2004 we ran into Chevron and in recent years we have signed Exxon Mobile. We have also signed on a lot of nuclear power plants. We analyzed the U.S. nuclear industry. We know there are 104 commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S., and all of them have leaked something in one way or another. We are present at 35% of those reactors and their plants. That sets us up well for the rest of the market.

Sramana Mitra: How much is a deal worth to you?

Neno Duplan: It depends on the deal. We do not sell on a per-reactor basis; we do our deals based on the comprehensive solution. One utility may manage more than 12 reactors, while another company may manage only one reactor. A typical client like Exxon will be just over $500,000 per year in annual revenue. We can add additional clients at little cost because our solution is all web based.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the market?

Neno Duplan: Different analysts have come up with different numbers, but the one that seems to be the most common is $2 billion per year for information management around environmental, carbon and sustainability management. Some analysts have gone as high as $15 billion. It is not opening up too fast, but it does grow steadily. It will be very large because we have screwed up this planet and now we have to take care of it.

Sramana Mitra: What does your competitive landscape look like?

Neno Duplan: The landscape has gotten particularly competitive over the past two years. We have two sets of competitors. On one hand, we have the large ERP companies like SAP and Oracle moving into this space through acquisitions. On the other hand, there are the hundreds of startups that have been created in the past several years all with the anticipation that U.S. legislation would be passed for carbon management. Those companies are already starting to shake out because that legislation was not passed.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech
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