The EMOS market today looks like the ERP market in 1998

Substitutes everywhere, a leader nowhere

The EMOS market (Energy Management and Optimization Systems) today looks like the ERP market in the late 1990s.

Back then nobody said "ERP system". People said: "we have a spreadsheet that works", "we have software from a guy we know", "we have a module in accounting". Substitutes everywhere. A leader nowhere. The category was only just crystallising in the minds of finance directors.

And a new role was appearing alongside it. IT Manager — and today, Digital Transformation Manager. Five years earlier that position simply did not exist in most companies. Suddenly it did.

The same story, a different market

Move to the present. Energy management is dominated by substitutes: a BMS, meters, Excel, an external consultant. Outside a narrow industry, the "EMOS" category is barely recognisable. There is no leader. And in companies, the Energy Manager is appearing — a position that effectively did not exist five years ago.

A similar phenomenon, nearly three decades later, in an entirely different market.

Three conclusions from the analogy

First: the leaders of this category are yet to emerge. Whoever builds the position of "the EMOS people" today will, in ten years, be what SAP, Oracle or IFS are to ERP now. This category will produce its leaders exactly as ERP produced its own — and it will happen faster than most decision-makers expect today.

Second: the discussion about features is secondary. The argument over "whose EMOS has the better features" leads nowhere. In 1998 nobody chose an ERP from a list of modules. They chose based on whether the vendor understood that this was a new category of process, and not simply a better spreadsheet.

Third — and most important in practice: the Energy Manager's role is structurally difficult today. And not because anyone is doing anything wrong. Finance gets an ERP, HR gets an HRIS, sales gets a CRM. The Energy Manager gets a BMS, meters, Excel, a spreadsheet from the solar contractor and a consultant's phone number — and glues a process together out of that, because the market has not yet given them a tool. In parallel they have to explain to the board how an EMOS differs from a BMS and from a consultant, just to get the budget for that tool at all. It is category-definition work that nobody explicitly assigned to them — and they carry it alongside the day job.

There is no need to accelerate history

Technology categories mature to a fairly repeatable pattern: from substitutes, through the appearance of a new role in the organisation, to the emergence of leaders and standardisation. ERP went that way. EMOS is roughly halfway there today.

There is no need to accelerate history. It is enough to recognise it.