Total Wreck or Fender-Bender?: Knowing When It's
Time To Replace Your ETRM System
Living with a complex and expensive software system as part of your business can be a trying affair. When it is also mission-critical, the experience just gets more intense. After the cost, effort, and sometimes the pain of selecting, purchasing, customising and implementing a system, you want it to be perfect. All the data goes in smoothly. All the calculations are correct. Reports run on time. Your IT support budget is under control. Features your traders have never had available before work flawlessly. Everyone is happy, busily taking advantage of this wonderful new tool procured for them.
By Rich Pedersen, KPMG LLP, Commodities Now, June 2007.

Triple Point's 'Visual Cockpit' Optimizes Natural Gas Scheduling
Trades and Schedules Seamlessly Integrated for Real-Time, Accurate Decision Making
By Triple Point, Commodities Now, December 2006.

Operational Risks In Commodity Trading Companies
This article defines operational risk in commodity trading companies (CTCs) and then focuses on identifying some of the operational risks apparent in commodity trading due to internal and controllable events, identifying them with the three dimensions of risk management: People, Systems and Process. Finally, it touches upon the benefits of a process-oriented approach in mitigating the operational risks in commodities trading.
By Raghu Anantharam & Rajashekhar Mantripragada, Infosys Technologies, Commodities Now, September 2006.

Information Systems: For Small & Medium Trading Businesses
Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) play a very important role in energy and commodity industries. The author suggests the key information system requirements for such enterprises and presents a solution approach.
By Atul Agrawal, Infosys Technologies, Commodities Now, June 2006.

Top Ten Energy Market IT Related Developments, 2006
The commodity markets, and energy in particular, continue to undergo significant developments in market infrastructure. Presented here are the top ten energy IT related market trends with special emphasis on Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). This is a summary of an extensive report related to global market developments and the ISV community.
By Paul Mahady, President, MAS, Commodities Now, March 2006.

Welcome to the Co-ordinated Real-Time Enterprise
Winners in today's complex, volatile markets will utilise business intelligence for better performance management and to achieve competitive advantage. The right decision support tools can harness data for better trading and business results.
By Michael Schwartz, Triple Point Technology, Commodities Now, December 2005.

Manage Your Energy Assets As You Would Value Them!
There is no shortage of lessons learned from the collapse of Enron and others. Much has been written about the influence of corporate ethics, compliance standards (or lack thereof), mark-to-market accounting and outright fraud on the fate of companies affected. This article focuses on one of the contributing factors which did not attract its fair share of attention: how the various companies' approach to managing their large investment in energy assets (such as generating plants) contributed to their ultimate demise.
By Soli Forouzan, CFA, is SVP, Product Management & Market Strategy for SunGard Energy Solutions, Commodities Now, September 2005

Modular Global Sourcing - An Imperative for the ETRM Industry
In our previous article1 ETRM - Top 5 IT Imperatives, we articulated key business imperatives and the resultant top IT imperatives for the ETRM2 sector. This article, in continuation, delves deeper into the imperative of scalability. In its quest to achieve straight-through-processing (STP) and zero-tolerance culture towards compliance, control and data integrity, the ETRM sector is witnessing a surge of multiple intertwined IT initiatives. These range from small ROI-justified projects to huge projects in the risk and operations domain spanning multiple geographies and internal business units.
By Naren Koduvattat, Rahul Shah & Balaji Yellavalli, Infosys Technologies, Commodities Now, June 2005.

Quality is a Priority When Selecting Energy Trading Software
Quality is an important attribute to consider when evaluating trading, risk management, and transaction processing software. A key indicator of a strong software provider is the quality they can assure customers from the earliest stages of the product development cycle. It's not an afterthought. It's about embedding reliability into business practices and processes so that products are recognised industry-wide as well designed, easily assimilated, and defect free as possible.
By Brian Shydlo, Commodities Now, December 2004.

IT in the Post-Enron Global Economy
Much of the business world is still living in the shadow of an economic downturn, and the IT industry is enduring painful times as CFOs have had to squeeze IT budgets and demand greater efficiencies, as they have done with all departments. But anticipation that this period is coming to an end is creating some hope for weary CIOs everywhere.
By Was Rahman, Commodities Now, December 2003.

European Emissions Trading
Whereas the success of global climate policy still depends on Russia's outstanding ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (KP), the European Union is making swift headway towards substantial cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A new directive confronts the larger part of European industry with mandatory emission caps and far reaching business implications. Three recent emissions trading simulations run by CarbonSim Pty Ltd. have provided important insights into emission trading at operational level and helped companies prepare for the carbon-constrained future.
By Urs Brodmann, Commodities Now, September 2003.

Wasting Money on Information Services?
Information services have become a critical element of an energy firm's operations. Industry expenditures on these various services are considerable - over USD1 billion per year. However, a significant portion of this expenditure is wasted on unneeded and under utilised products. In an era of increased competition and cost cutting there is a considerable opportunity for organisations to review these information purchases and realise substantial savings and operating efficiencies.
By Alan M. Herbst, Utilis Energy, LLC, Commodities Now, June 2003.

ETRM Software - The Market Moves on
The long awaited shake-out of the European energy trading and risk management (ETRM) sector has begun in earnest and is set to continue. It comes as no surprise that the European energy market is not big enough to financially support over fifteen electronic trading platforms and a similar number of major trading and risk management solutions vendors. Despite this simple truth, substantial numbers of companies are digging in for a battle of attrition that they hope will see them emerge victorious.
By Michael Hepburn, Prospex Research Ltd, Commodities Now, June 2003.

Top 10 Energy Market IT Related Developments for 2003
The energy industry has undergone extraordinary turbulence in the last few years traumatically impacting retail and wholesale energy markets. These industry and market developments have enormous implications for information technology demand and the suppliers that service the industry.
By Paul Mahady, Commodities Now, March 2003.

Online Trading Platforms: To Build or to Buy?
Until recently the preferred approach by both brokers and exchanges has been to build proprietary trading systems at great cost and great risk. However, there is an unmistakable growing trend for companies to now consider buying proven "best of breed" solutions and customising them to suit their specific trading requirements.
By Sarah Keys of Trayport Limited, Commodities Now, September 2002.