Cleantech Friday by Steve Guengerich

I’m at the 2nd annual Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week where my BSG Alliance colleague Susan Scrupski helped put together the Enterprise 2.0 track.

It’s a fascinating show, not the least of which is the manner in which it was pulled together.  The conference lead, Ismael Ghalimi literally produced the entire conference together in 8 weeks (last year, it was 6!)…there are 72 product vendors, 500 attendees, 2 full days of dual-track and keynote programming, top-flight hotel accommodations, etc., etc.  In other words, everything you would expect and more from an A-list, technorati conference that historically one would expect to take 12 months to plan and execute well.

But, as I’ve been meandering through the show, I’ve been struck with a number of random observations.  Kind of a juxtaposition of what’s going on in software, communications, etc. (web/enterprise/office 2.0) with what’s going on in sustainability/clean energy/cleantech.  Some of the random observations:

• One of the hallmarks of the Office 2.0  conference is its “all digital – no paper” philosophy, right down to the distribution of an iPhone to all attendees to use as their personal show navigator.  Yet, walking around the show at the ritzy St. Regis hotel, you can’t help but notice the enormous amount of wasted paper products:  bathrooms with enormous stacks of the best, embossed throw-away paper towels; paper-box lunches with multiple paper/plastic wrapping containers in them, etc.).
• An interesting figure cited by Arthur Lin, CTO of Nokia, during the mobility keynote was Nokia’s current sales pace of 1 million Nokia units sold per day (compare that with the 1 million *total* iPhone units sold to date, even with all of the initial hype, that Apple proudly announced in the past week).  With an annual sales volume of 3 billion units worldwide (1 for every 2 people on earth), the question is:  where do all those old handsets go?  Sounds like a growth opportunity for companies like Austin’s TechTurn which took in a $50 million round of private equity last year.
• Ironic side-discussion with an old acquaintance, Keith Patterson, CEO/founder of Intensil – a super cool little Office 2.0 company that “has legs” but is struggling to get attention from the funding community.  We talked about why, in this Bay Area “target rich environment” of money-women and –men, with Keith’s immediate response being “It’s because they are all focused on cleantech”…humorously, just an hour or so earlier during one of the panels, I couldn’t help noticing as I glanced around the room that an attendee right in front of me was deeply involved in his “Cleantech Investing” catch-up reading.
• Finally, at dinner last night, at Postrio (once you’ve left the bar, don’t even try to order the sausage – you won’t get it!), my colleague Nick Vitalari and I were visiting with one of Nick’s clients.  This gent, CIO of a progressive, East-coast utility with several million customers, was saying that his 2 greatest cleantech priorities to support future growth of his business were storage and business analytics.  What’s business analytics you ask?  It’s a combination of process, technology, and sophisticated algorithms that can provide deep understanding of the connection between what a company is doing (or planning) and its customers. Take a look at this business analytics primer by Tom Davenport (a former Longhorn!) if you’d like to know more.

Just another reminder of the delta in the maturity cycle between cleantech 1.0 and office 2.0.  As always, let me know your thoughts and see you next week!