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[eds]

The manner in which solar developers
. . . . . . identify,
. . . . . . track and
. . . . . . quote, potential customers today,
. . . is decades behind other industries.

SolarCity’s customer acquisition costs,
. . . have actually increased year over year,
. . . while installation costs have plummeted.

In the pharmaceutical space,
. . . Veeva Systems (an Emergence portfolio company),
. . . built a customer relationship management (CRM) solution,
. . . focused exclusively on solving,
. . . customer acquisition problems in pharma.
This vertical-specific solution,  
. . . improved sales productivity, by an average of 66%.

A similar tool for solar, could marry,
. . . building data with customer demographic information,
. . . to make developers substantially more effective,
. . . at closing deals.
Solar needs a Veeva-like tool,
. . . to accelerate the path to grid parity,
. . . (the point at which solar electricity costs,
. . . the same as average grid electricity, and
. . . growth skyrockets).

The good news is that a lot of folks are working,
. . . to build this type of industry cloud application.
The Department of Energy’s SunShot Catalyst program is funding,
. . . a slew of early stage solar software companies.
Powerhouse, a solar-focused accelerator, is incubating still more.
And even the VCs have started to put money back into the sector,
. . . including Obvious Ventures’ recent $3.5 million funding of Sighten.

1-30-2016 Source:  How Cloud Software Can Save The World

[Shortpoet-GTD]

Data clouds may be better but I don't trust our data in one place for everyone to hack into. Hell, they have
hacked into the Pentagon for god's sake-nothing is safe from hackers.