The CTRM Blog

I was in Calgary this week visiting with the folks at SAS RiskAdvisory and speaking at an event that they produced for their clients.  I continue to be impressed with the vision the RiskAdvisory group has in the area of utilizing SAS’s latest data and information aggregation solutions to enable sophisticated energy risk analytics across the entirety of a energy centric enterprise.  Their approach, which they call Energy Commodity Risk Aggregation and Analytics (ECRAA) has taken advantage of SAS’s industry leadership in the areas of data integration and enterprise risk, and have combined that with their expertise and experience in energy risk modeling.  The result is a solution that has seen very good success and acceptance, including the signing of one of Canada’s largest oil and gas producers in just the last couple of weeks.

SolArc appears to be having success with their new Risk Solutions Group. Last year they hired Dr. Rick Boesch, who has constructed a number of successful risk applications and solutions for CSFB, Deutsche and Sungard. The New York Observer recently reported that they are expanding their New York office. I recently caught up with Rick Boesch, Managing Director of Risk Solutions and Alan Gunn, VP of Product Marketing to understand what their plans are given the recent news.

Michael Coleman, CEO of Hyper Rig, sees lots of opportunity for his company as trading firms try to get a better grip on their businesses with an eye on forthcoming and new regulation. “The banks are way ahead of energy firms such as large utilities in their thinking about risk management and are pushing towards intra-day risk reporting.” he told me this morning. “On the other hand, many large utilities would like to get to better than monthly risk reporting.” Coleman sees that many larger trading firms are hindered by their portfolio of systems which lack the scalability and processing power to provide the business with the numbers they need on demand and those systems, he says, are very often bottlenecks that provide an added set of operational risks to be managed. No where is that more apparent than at utilities and producers where CTRM solutions often lack the sophisticated asset models they require forcing them to run those models off system which, in turn, increases the problem of aggregating risks across the business.

I came across this recently and I just couldn’t resist posting it here….. Sheer genius.

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.

She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Several months ago at E-World in Essen I was introduced to Mr. Rajeev Bhatt of eOpt Solutions. eOpt are based in Germany and describe themselves as “a unique products and services company, that offers smart solutions in the Energy Trading and Risk Management space.” Founded in late 2008 by a small group of energy industry professionals who had spent several years at the forefront of energy and technology, eOpt saw opportunities to provide specialist software tools and consulting in and around the periphery of traditional CTRM software. By focusing on areas where CTRM software can often be weak, Mr. Bhatt was confident that eOpt had found a good business opportunity.