The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is the state’s largest agency with approximately 65,000 employees and a $10.3 billion budget. CDCR is responsible for housing, transporting or tracking more than 156,000 adult prisoners, approximately 104,000 parolees and roughly 1,100 juvenile offenders. In 2007, to save costs and reduce carbon emissions, CDCR launched an energy saving initiative.

Legislative mandates, budget cuts and internal IT policy created the need to modernize processes and procedures. In 2008, CDCR transitioned to a new, fully integrated business information system to streamline various internal operations. In October 2011, the agency launched a new Strategic Offender Management System for managing all offender data. With more data on the network, this was the ideal time to find other ways to cut power usage and costs.

CDCR sought a way to control power costs related to the 34,000 PCs it had on its networks. It was also interested in reducing its carbon footprint as part of the state-wide Green Initiative. After discovering Verdiem through an incentive program offered by a local utility, CDCR learned it could cut power to PCs by controlling their operating status. In response to the statewide Green Initiative, CDCR’s goal was to reduce the total amount of energy used by its IT departments by at least 20 percent.