LANL Sends Environmental Management to the Cloud

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Locus Technologies claimed the contract to manage the LANL’s lab data in their cloud was worth up to $2 million.

EIM Software to Manage Hydro Fracturing Data

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Locus Technologies has expanded its flagship product EIM to manage data and information for natural gas exploration and production sites that use hydro fracturing technologies to extract gas from shale.

The relatively new drilling method for natural gas extraction — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting large amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas. Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material. According to recent NY Times article, there were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990. Around 90 percent have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the drilling industry.

For the natural gas industry to stay in compliance with ever stricter laws to protect drinking water supplies and air emissions, drilling companies need software tools to organize hydrofracking waste data in order to demonstrate to the public and regulators that hydrofracking activities are not endangering natural resources. They also need to prove that any dangerous waste from the wells is handled in compliance with state and federal laws. Although hydrofracking has been used for decades, the technology has become more powerful and more widely used in recent years, producing far more wastewater and attracting much more public and regulatory scrutiny.

Nearly all of the activities associated with hydrocracking, including the assessment of site characteristics, the ongoing monitoring of site conditions and air emissions, and the remediation of adverse environmental impacts, involve the collection and/or analysis of large quantities of data. The specialized software to organize, manage, validate, visualize, store, and report this information formerly did not exist until Locus expanded its award winning, web-based EIM software to provide industry with the necessary tools to do so.

This expanded module in EIM was specifically designed to meet the hydrofracturing industry’s needs for managing subsurface and water quality data that include both analytical chemistry, waste, and radionuclides. Since EIM has been deployed in the Cloud for over ten years at many similar oil and gas exploration sites and nuclear facilities nationwide, the system provides for rapid deployment, an unmatched level of functionality and data security, an extensive set of QC/QC standards, and scalability.

The hydrofracking industry has been in the spotlight in recent months and Locus wanted to provide this business sector with a tool to prove its case to the public and regulators that natural gas production using hydrofacking can be done safely and transparently. As such, we expanded our software offerings to manage and visualize water, waste, wastewater, drilling fluids, radionuclides and air emissions more effectively over the web.  We felt that the market needed an off-the-shelf tool targeted to manage hydrofracking data, being that is subject to a different set of state and federal regulatory guidance. Locus’s software provides any natural gas production site that has a need for data management and reporting—and almost all have—the necessary functionality to meet these requirements.

Water quality and waste management are not the only issues at hydrofracking sites. Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Locus ePortal software when combined with EIM provides a comprehensive compliance solution for the natural gas industry to manage contaminants in all media ( water, soil, and air) in a single, integrated  system through a Single Sign On (SSO).

EIM, Locus’ Environmental Information Management software, is the world’s largest commercial on-demand environmental data management system. EIM completely replaces existing stand-alone data systems and reporting tools to provide a comprehensive integrated solution to one of the environmental industries’ most vexing problems – the centralization and management of complex data pertaining to contaminated water, groundwater, soil, and/or air. EIM provides for the complete electronic processing of analytical data, beginning with the upload of electronic data deliverables from labs, and terminating in state-mandated or federal regulatory exports and reporting. EIM is deployed through Software as a Service (SaaS) model that eliminates most of the difficulties associated with the adoption of a new technology, while offering the opportunity for more rapid customization to meet the ever-changing needs of its user population. The system currently stores over 120 million records for over 15,000 sites worldwide.

Locus Receives SAS 70 Certification

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Locus Cloud Computing Environmental Software Platform SAS 70 Certified

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 18 January 2011 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, announced that it has been certified as compliant with the Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations (SAS 70).

Locus passed an in-depth audit of its control objectives activities pertaining to database management and information technology. The certification places Locus in a rare category among environmental data management providers to have attained the rigorous classification. In today’s risk-management environment, it is essential that service providers like Locus demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards in place so customers can be confident that their data are safe.

“By becoming SAS 70 certified, Locus shows that we are not only in compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but that we hold the security of our customers’ data paramount,” said Dr. Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus Technologies.

“Whether your environmental data are currently hosted by another provider, or you’re searching for a company to manage your data, your company should demand evidence that your data are safe and protected by a highly controlled process. We are pleased to know that our customers’ environmental data for water, sustainability, emissions, and greenhouse gas data have been deemed to be in full compliance with SAS 70,” continued Duplan.

In addition to being SAS 70 certified, Locus requires that its key suppliers also comply with SAS 70 standards. For example, Locus’ data center and cloud hosting provider have been certified recently to have processes and safeguards in place. These safeguards are designed to protect Locus’ assets and data that reside in the company’s managed hosting services data center. A service auditor’s examination—performed in accordance with SAS No. 70 Type II—is widely recognized because it confirms that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of its control objectives and activities, which includes controls over information technology services and related processes.

Completion of the SAS 70 Type II examination of Locus’ managed hosting data center proves that an independent accounting and auditing firm has formally evaluated the company’s processes, procedures, and controls. The examination included controls related to service delivery, support services, security, monitoring, change management, data backup, environmental controls, and logical and physical access.

SAS 70 is designated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an acceptable method for an organization’s management to obtain assurance about a third-party service organization’s internal controls without conducting a separate assessment.

As the world’s most comprehensive on-demand software for organizing environmental data and information, Locus is the partner of choice for all organizations that seek a credible and cost-effective solution to their energy and environmental management and reporting needs.

ZDNet GreenTech Pastures | Locus adds water module to environment software application portfolio

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Water management problems capture more attention from environmental technology player Locus.

Locus Technologies Receives Vendor Rating

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Locus Rated by Leading Analyst Firm

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 11 May 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus) today announced that Gartner, Inc., the leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry, has rated the company “Promising” in a recent report.

“Locus is very pleased to have received a Gartner Vendor Rating. Our current customers already know the value our Cloud Computing solutions bring to their environmental information management challenges” said Locus President and CEO, Neno Duplancic. “We believe Gartner’s coverage of our firm confirms our position in the market and our commitment to providing customers with cost-effective and innovative SaaS software solutions that meet their current and emerging environmental data and information management needs, including addressing upcoming GHG and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting.”

Locus’ flagship environmental data management system EIM is used worldwide to manage and report environmental data and information and is managing over 100 million environmental data records for some of the world’s largest companies. Locus’ ePortal provides the platform to bring together Locus’ modular applications into a single integrated solution that can be tailored for environmental compliance, greenhouse gas tracking, or environmental health and safety (EHS) tracking depending on a company’s individual need. Locus’ EHS module also provides GRI indicator tracking and reporting capabilities. All of Locus’ solutions are on-demand providing customers with cost-effective and timely implementation options to meet their business requirements.

 

VENDOR RATING DISCLAIMER
The Vendor Rating is copyrighted 21 April 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Vendor Rating is an evaluation of a vendor as a whole and is based on Gartner’s assessment of the vendor’s vision and execution for a product or service, relative to Gartner’s analysis of clients’ requirements. It is not intended as a comparison relative to competitors in the market. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Vendor Rating, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner “Vendor Rating: Locus Technologies” by Dan Miklovic, 21 April 2009
The complete report is available to Gartner clients at www.gartner.com.

For more information, visit www.locustec.com or contact Ms. Marian Carr at (650) 960-1640.

Locus to Present Cloud Computing for EHS Management at EUEC 2009 in Phonenix, AZ

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Join Locus at the EUEC 2009 Annual Conference & Expo in Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix, AZ., 1-4 February 2009 |Booth #827 —Locus will present a paper on Cloud Computing solutions for the EHS industry and display our newest cloud computing products (eEHS and eTask) as well as our flagship product EIM.  Please visit us at Booth 827 and see the systems that are changing how environmental professionals manage, analyze, and report environmental data and information.

Is a large portion of your environmental data sitting in spreadsheets and home-built databases?

Robust enterprise databases are standard tools in other industries, but, for whatever reason, the environmental business has failed to fully embrace them. What happens to the sampling and analytical data generated from the investigations, cleanups, air emissions monitoring, or operation and maintenance of a company’s sites? For many, it is entered into spreadsheets, a commercial client/server database, or a home-grown database—with spreadsheets often being the most popular of these alternatives.

Let’s suppose a company has 10-million analytical records stored in spreadsheets and databases dispersed across multiple offices. Our research shows that the average cost to organize, manage, and report this data through independent systems over a 3-year period would be more than $2 million. Stop by Locus’ Booth #827 and let us demonstrate how using our Locus EIM on-demand data management system can drop your number by 85%—or more than a staggering $1.7 million.

 

Locus Presents | Cloud Computing Solutions for Global Environmental Sustainability Reporting, by Marian Carr and Robert Albo | Session G5: EMIS and EHS | Tuesday, 3 February 2009 1:40 pm

Locus’ Environmental Software Provides US Virgin Island Refinery with Key Savings

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Hovensa Moves to Cloud Computing with Locus’ EIM Software

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., 12 January 2009 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in web-based environmental compliance and information management software, today announced that the Hovensa Refinery in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands has selected Locus Technologies Environmental Information Management (EIM) system to streamline managing environmental sampling and remedial operations data at the refinery.

Hovensa is a joint venture between subsidiaries of Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). This refinery is one of the ten largest in the world and one of the most modern in the United States with a crude oil processing capacity of 500,000 barrels per day (BPD). Hovensa operates its facilities on 2,000 acres on the south shore of St. Croix and receives and processes crude oil from around the world.

After reviewing available options to manage their environmental data, Hovensa opted for EIM to meet their demanding requirements, which include a single data repository accessible by all their vendors, regardless of location. EIM’s cloud computing platform was the ideal system to provide the access desired and the robust data management features to address both sampling and operations data.

“Locus is excited that Hovensa selected EIM and is using the system to its fullest,” said Locus President Neno Duplancic. “It’s very gratifying when a customer fully embraces the system and its potential to not only manage their data but to drive cost savings through data collection and report automation. Using EIM’s flexible interface, Hovensa can streamline sample planning and data validation using mainland contractors and labs and produce automated reports of operations status all from the same system.”

Web 2.0 to the Rescue For Dirty Data Management in the Environmental Industry

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Environmental Business Journal, Instruments and Information Systems

Locus introduces environmental Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) standards

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A growing need exists for a standardized format for transmitting environmental electronic data. There are more than 15 different standards in use in the U.S. alone, most of which are antiquated. Locus leverages the latest XML technology to drive standard consolidation and ease of use.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 30 2007 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental data management software, announced today the release of a set of its first standard Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) formats for the reporting of environmental laboratory analytical data. With the recent signings of several large Fortune 100 clients, and the upcoming tenfold increase in the number of sites with data in the company’s flagship product, EIM™, a growing need exists for a standardized format for transmitting electronic data. Several EDD formats already exist in the environmental industry—some promulgated by government agencies—and others by vendors of commercial software products. However, some of these format “standards” suffer from the requirement that data be submitted in multiple files, while other formats, have antiquated requirements related to field lengths or valid values that originated at a time when hard disk space was at a premium.

Locus’s Extensible Markup Language (XML) formatted single-file standard EDD allows for much more flexibility in file structure, because the data self-identifies each field using labels to bracket its contents. The content is similar and compliant with the (Staged Electronic Data Deliverable (SEDD) format. SEDD is an inter-agency effort spearheaded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to create a generic XML-based format for electronic delivery of analytical data for environmental industry.

To simplify the work of legacy systems, Locus is also releasing an EDD standard format, which consists of 53 explicitly defined fields maintained in a single file. Clients may request that additional custom fields be included to meet specific agency, the major state submission, or project requirements. The selection of the fields that are included in the Locus EIM EDD format was based on input from Locus’s user community and experts in analytical data management, as well as a review of the most popular currently used EDDs. The contents of the format permit data to be validated to EPA Level II, if a customer so desires. Locus envisions this format to be transitional for the companies and laboratories that are not yet ready to adopt XML-based technology, but are tired of dealing with multiple and antiquated file formats, which only serve to increase IT costs.

Since the release of EIM in 1999, Locus has allowed companies to design their own EDD formats, and Locus will continue to support this flexibility in its systems. However, Locus believes that the promulgation of a standardized format will allow laboratories to reduce the costs of creating EDDs, minimize errors in the reporting of data, and more quickly support new EIM clients.

“As the leader in environmental data management software, Locus strives to provide guidance, direction, and endorsement to the best ideas in an effort to standardize data management processes. Currently, there are more than 15 different standards for analytical data submittals, and this needs to change,” said Locus’s president and CEO, Neno Duplancic. “We believe that the standards we are releasing today, one transitional and one XML-based, will take steps toward achieving that goal and will help drive uniformity in the marketplace. With more than 35,000 sites reporting through LocusFocus EIM, Locus customers represent the largest users of environmental lab data, so this effort should help drive consolidation of the standards. Locus is committed to meeting all federal and state EDDs and leading the industry in reducing proliferation of incompatible formats by strongly endorsing XML-based SEDD standards,” added Duplancic.

Locus’s XML-based EDD accepts files in Stage 2a SEDD format, which contains the basic analytical results (including the sample ID, analyte, result, and qualifier) plus method quality control data. The EIM import module includes data verification and consistency checks outlined in the Document Type Definition (DTD) for Stage 2a, as well as forms for viewing the data in the imported SEDD file. Both formats can be downloaded for free from the Locus’s website at www.locustec.com.

Locus announces free year-end legacy data loading

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The Leader in On-Demand Environmental Information Management

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 17, 2006 — Locus Technologies, the industry leader in on-demand environmental information management, announced today a limited time promotion for new customers to try Locus’s popular on-demand analytical data management software (EIM™). From now until the end of the year, Locus will offer free data loading for up to five (5) sites for any new customer who signs up for its on-demand environmental data management services. Locus is making this offer to encourage companies to try, risk-free, a whole new way of managing environmental data on the web.

Data management practices in the environmental industry have lagged far behind other more-visible departments in most companies. In the age of instant funds transfer, online banking, electronic data transfers, wireless Internet, and sophisticated enterprise data systems, it is, unfortunately, still common for mission-critical environmental data to be delivered via hard-copy mail and hand-keyed into simple desktop spreadsheets managed by various consultants with offices across the country. Even in the best of circumstances, data are attached to insecure emails and stored in custom-designed, single-use databases with limited, if any, access by the data owners and multiple project participants.

Locus is changing this paradigm and shaking up the environmental industry by delivering sophisticated, robust enterprise environmental data management tools on-line and ondemand to the marketplace. Locus’s EIM environmental data system combines one of the most advanced and robust databases with a full-featured front end to deliver an unequalled set of services to a sector long ignored. And all of this is offered online, on-demand, 24/7, anywhere in the world–meaning that no hardware or software investment is required, no installation is needed, and no IT department services are necessary. Just sign up, log in and start realizing what some of America’s largest companies have already discovered. Locus is offering free data loading to encourage companies to try a better approach that will forever change the way they manage data.

“We are continually surprised by the state of environmental data management in the environmental industry. Customers routinely come to us with boxes of CDs, faxes of report data tables, and hard-copy lab reports and tell us these are critical data for the closure of their environmental sites–sites that carry many millions of dollars of liability for the company for which they spent millions collecting the data. Locus helps customers migrate and organize their data quickly and effectively, so they can optimize the value they receive from Locus’s on-demand EIM software. Once uploaded to EIM, everyone can work from a single, centralized database and never again deal with inconsistent and inaccessible data,” said Neno Duplancic, President and CEO of Locus.

Locus’s on-demand model is an innovative, low-risk, and flexible solution for laboratories, consultants, regulatory agencies, potentially responsible parties (PRPs) and companies that own environmentally impacted sites. With little up-front investment, customers can take control of their data, rid themselves of the current inefficient and insecure practices, and start enjoying the benefits of EIM’s versatile and proven set of tools to manage, view, and
report their data. EIM organizes environmental data and automates analytical data management, from laboratory electronic data submittals and regulatory agency reporting to exciting data visualization in real-time through Google maps. EIM is the only system in the marketplace that has been serving environmental data on the web continuously more than 8 years.

You owe it to your company, and yourself, to try Locus’s EIM, and we are making it simple and risk-free with this offer. Please read the “fine print” for offer conditions and exclusions.

Fine Print: For a limited time, Locus is offering free upload of historical analytical data into our EIM system, free of charge. Maximum five (5) sites per customer. The offer is valid until 31 December 2006. To qualify for this offer, you must sign a 1-year hosted service contract with Locus and provide your data to Locus in one of the following electronic formats: EQuIS, GISKey, Terrabase, Access, Oracle, SQL database, Excel spreadsheet, flat ASCI file, or similar. A separate arrangement can be made for paper-based data. Locus’s existing customers are ineligible for this offer.