Software giant CA is moving beyond its traditional sphere of enterprise systems management software and moving into using its existing platforms to move into PDU, CRAC, grid and generator power measurement.

Speaking at a briefing in London where the company unveiled retail giant Tesco as a user of its ecoSoftware, CA said its ecoMeter module 'Captures detailed real-time information about energy use across your data centers and facilities, enabling measurements, trends, and alerts.'

'CA ecoMeter is licensed for on-premise implementation and integration with a wide range of third-party devices such as PDUs, UPSs, backup generators, branch circuits, cooling, environmental and building management systems,' the company said in a statement.

The firm unveiled the UK's largest retailer as a customer. Tesco has committed to a 50% cut in carbon emissions from new and existing stores and distribution centres by 2020, using 2006 as a baseline and for over two years the firm had been using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to gather and store data on carbon.

Simon Palinkas, head of the green IT group at Tesco, said: 'In terms of reporting our own carbon footprint. It is just difficult. We're been reporting from 2005 and 2006. And this is difficult to achieve around the group. We have so many stores and so many distribution centers, so much data floating around. Different countries have different emission factors, each of which can change and there are different energy types and sources to consider. With all this data coming in, how do you validate it?

"This is an enormously time consuming process using spreadsheets. We had built it up from scratch and when we started it was relatively simple. Then every year new data comes around and new data needs to be acquired. The data needs to be cut in different ways and it started to become an unmanageable task. While we can throw bodies at it to do the task if we are going to measure ourselves against our targets, having spreadsheets around the place won't do. We wanted a centralised solution that would simplify the process and that everyone has access to.'

Palinkas said that the future goal was to end manual input of data completely to automate collection and analytics of the data. He is not there yet, he said. 'Real time data collection will improve accuracy. It is about using IT to drive down carbon emissions.' he said.

Tesco is also closely examining how much carbon IT itself is producing and it is working to drastically reduce this.