A day after Cisco chief exec John Chambers promised shareholders that his firm will overcome slow sales by pursuing new markets, the networking vendor pulled the curtains back on a set of new solutions for reducing data center energy costs.

Cisco claims that IT power consumption is “the last and largest unmanaged business expense,” accounting for as much as 80 percent of organization-wide electricity use. To help CIOs tame their utility bills, the company is rolling out EnergyWise Management, a tool that provides visibility into the power consumption and efficiency of network devices. The platform is available in two editions: Distributed Office and Data Center, which lets admins keep tabs on their infrastructure footprint and automate asset discovery and inventory management using built-in analytics. Both versions of the software are available on a subscription basis in a support bundle.

The EnergyWise Management platform is joined by two service offerings that aim to help customers reduce identify hidden inefficiencies in their environments and lower energy consumption by as much as 35 percent.

Faiyaz Shahpurwala, the head of Cisco’s Industry Solutions Group, noted that “most companies don’t have an assigned energy management professional. EnergyWise provides the technology that allows businesses of all sizes (and across every industry) the level of visibility and management needed to reduce costs, increase employee responsibility and strengthen their corporate sustainability profile.”

Today’s product announcements come a few weeks after Cisco introduced a batch of UCS Solution Accelerator Paks for OpenStack. The bundles are designed to make it easier for companies to deploy their clouds on Cisco hardware, and support distributions from leading vendors such as Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical. The accelerator packs are complemented by OpenStack services, a reference architecture for the Havana distro and a plug-in that adds support for Cisco’s Nexus line of data center switches.