Undervaluing Regulatory Intelligence: Why Dakota Software Stopped Participating in the Verdantix EHS Software Green Quadrant

If you ask EHS leaders what’s driving their technology investment right now, the answer is consistent: regulations.

In a 2026 global survey by Verdantix, the independent analyst firm behind the industry’s leading EHS Software Green Quadrant benchmark, emerging regulations, ESG frameworks, and compliance standards top the list of factors respondents named as shaping EHS technology decisions over the next two years, ahead of executive priorities, macroeconomic conditions, even climate risk. 

So here’s the question we’ve been asking for a while: if regulatory pressure is what buyers say matters most, why doesn’t the industry’s leading EHS software benchmark measure it?

Where We Started: Our History with the Verdantix Green Quadrant

For more than 35 years, Dakota Software’s philosophy has been simple: regulatory compliance is the foundation that everything else in an EHS program is built on. Not a checkbox, not a cost center. The foundation. We built our ProActivity Suite around a continuously updated, human-curated library of regulatory content because we believed that getting the underlying regulatory picture right was the hardest and most consequential problem in the EHS software market, and the one most vendors were least equipped to solve.

In 2017, we put that philosophy to the test by participating in Verdantix’s Green Quadrant report for the first time. Verdantix identified our in-house regulatory content and site-specific compliance profiles as a genuine differentiator, calling it a “bulletproof” approach to managing EHS compliance. Our EHS Auditing capability scored highest in its category.

Two years later, the 2019 Verdantix Green Quadrant report recognized Dakota again, this time as an EHS Innovator, and specifically called out that, unlike most competitors, Dakota develops its US-focused regulatory content in-house. The report recommended Dakota to North American organizations for whom compliance management was a top priority.

We were proud of both. We still are.

Giving Credit Where It’s Due

Before we get to the part where we disagree, it’s worth saying clearly: Verdantix’s methodology is thorough. The questionnaire alone runs into the hundreds of points and takes hours, sometimes days, to complete. Each solution provider demonstrates its product live, customer interviews verify the claims, and a transparent weighting framework shows exactly how much each capability contributes to the final score.

That’s more rigor than most analyst benchmarks bring to the table, and it’s part of why the Verdantix EHS Software Green Quadrant carries real weight with buyers. This isn’t a story about bad research. It’s a story about what even good research chooses to measure, and what it doesn’t.

Where the Gap Opened Up in EHS Management Software

Go back and look at the 2019 report’s own conclusions, and you can already see where things were headed: Verdantix’s own analysis at the time pointed to safety and operational risk functionality as the areas increasingly driving buyer priority and software adoption. That’s a reasonable finding on its own. But it also marked the start of a drift, one that’s now fully visible in the current methodology.

The 2026 Green Quadrant report publishes exactly how each functional capability is weighted:

Look closer, and the gap gets more specific. Within each of those small Environmental categories, regulatory currency, whether the underlying regulatory data actually reflects what’s changed and when, is reduced to a single sub-question buried alongside three or four unrelated ones about calculation engines, permit tracking, and reporting formats. 

Regulatory intelligence is never assessed as a capability in its own right, anywhere in the framework. Not under Environmental. Not under the catch-all “EHS compliance and risk management” category, which asks about risk registers and emergency response but never about how current, complete, or defensible a vendor’s regulatory content actually is.

That’s the gap. Not a lack of rigor, but a structural blind spot in how regulatory guidance, change tracking, readiness, and risk are measured.

Why We Stepped Back: Key Takeaways

After our 2019 recognition, we made a decision: we weren’t going to keep participating in the Verdantix Green Quadrant because its framework measured features and functions but not the capabilities that we believe matter most. This wasn’t a reaction to any single report or conclusion. It was a conscious decision, made from a position we’d already proven out twice, that continuing to compete inside a methodology that structurally underweighted regulatory readiness didn’t serve us or the buyers reading the report.

We’ve shared this feedback with Verdantix directly over the years. We respect their work enough to have that conversation and make a case for reconsidering how these capabilities are categorized and scored. This post is simply the first time we’re sharing our thoughts publicly.

“From day one, our vision has been simple: give EHS leaders high quality regulatory content they can trust and act on. Obligations are complex and keep evolving. That’s why we built the platform to scale, from applicability mapping to audit, so our customers, who range from mid-market teams to the largest, most complex multi-site enterprises, can measure regulatory readiness and mitigate risk, no matter how complicated the regulatory landscape gets.” 

— Reg Shiverick, President, Dakota Software

What a Real EHS Regulatory Readiness Category Would Measure

If Verdantix, or anyone, built a real regulatory readiness category, here’s what it would need to score:

• Jurisdictional coverage depth: Does the platform provide detailed information on federal and state requirements, or just the federal baseline?
• Applicability-mapping accuracy: Can the tool determine which specific requirements apply to a specific facility, or does it leave that work to the customer?
• Change-detection latency: When a regulation changes, how long before the platform can analyze it and show the update in a customer’s compliance plan?
• Regulatory Readiness: Does the platform allow EHS leaders to see which of their sites are keeping up with regulatory changes, in addition to compliance task status?
• Audit-defensibility: Can the platform show its work? Is the regulatory content sourced, curated, and traceable enough to hold up when a regulator asks how a compliance decision was made?

These are the questions EHS leaders should be asking every solution provider claiming to help them manage regulatory risk, whether or not an analyst report asks them first.

Where We Stand Today: Not Named a Leader, and Why That’s the Point

Regulatory obligations haven’t gotten simpler since 2019. If anything, the number of “action-forcing requirements” EHS teams have to track has only grown. Compliance and risk management continues to be a driver for EHS software purchases now, as it was then. What’s changed is how the analyst community scores software capabilities against that reality, and we don’t think it’s kept pace. Our solutions and services support these challenges head on, with an emphasis on a streamlined user experience and analytics to measure progress toward corporate sustainability goals.

We’re proud that Verdantix’s most recent Buyer’s Guide to Specialized Mid-Market EHS Software recognizes Dakota as an “EHS regulatory risk platform” built for high-risk operations, well-suited to organizations seeking regulatory certainty in their compliance planning. That recognition hasn’t gone anywhere. What’s changed is which report it shows up in. And, frankly, we think that report’s open-ended nature allows for a more honest overview of EHS solution innovation rather than the Green Quadrant’s feature and functionality rankings.

We’ll keep building the EHS software solutions we’ve always built, with regulatory intelligence creating value at the core, not bolted on, so EHS leaders can navigate their obligations efficiently instead of just checking boxes. If that’s the problem you’re trying to solve, we’d love to help you explore it. Contact us to get started.