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In The News
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September, 2006
Innovation in Motion
OpenLink is continuously enhancing its products to keep clients ahead of the game, says the firm’s CEO Coleman Fung. He describes some of its future offerings.
How has OpenLink kept up with the fast-changing pace of energy trading?
OpenLink is constantly innovating to meet the ever-changing needs of energy traders, predicting and creating the future of a shifting, volatile market. We live by one simple philosophy: focusing on our relationship with clients and designing products to meet their needs. By enhancing applications and applying advanced technologies to serve clients through research and development, OpenLink is always at the cutting edge of possibility.
New and greatly enhanced modules such as Producer Services and gMotion are examples of our commitment to our simple philosophy. In addition, we are currently investing in cMotion – our integrated scheduling solution for crude and refined products, covering all operations and administrative tasks – as well as a new version of pMotion.
Why invest in these new logistics solutions?
Many of the ‘once-stellar’ logistic vendors were here today and gone tomorrow, struggling with customer service, making little to no investment in their legacy products and leaving a void in the energy trading and risk management arena. OpenLink seized the opportunity to assist their clients by incorporating core Endur functionality, like real-time messaging facility, combined trading and scheduling position management and straight-through processing, among others in our new logistic products. OpenLink’s research and development group predicted that, with integrated scheduling components, Endur would offer unparalleled capabilities to reduce operational risk and to address the demanding Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Voted top software vendor for operational risk software, OpenLink continues to be the strongest player in the energy trading and risk management space.
Could you give an example of how your integrated solution makes a difference?
Taking the European gas market as an example, energy firms and banks involved in European gas logistics face quite a hurdle. Consider the following key challenges across European pipelines: hourly trading and scheduling; differing imbalance limit periods; percentage limits; absolute limits; fee structures; gas day definitions; shipper code tracking requirements; time zones; pipelines balanced at the zone level and others balanced at the pipeline level; unique delay times; minimum nomination intervals; maximum numbers of nominations; and the list goes on.
Our new, enhanced version of gMotion seamlessly handles all of these tasks: you get an intuitive tool that displays disparate balancing zones on a single screen; the buys, the sells, the injections and withdrawals from storage, the gas flows across interconnects; and the resulting imbalances for a given day is all there. You have to see it in action or, rather, in motion.
Tell us about the Producer Services module.
OpenLink’s new Producer Services module is a flexible new tool that combines accounting, sales, data inventory and contracts in a way that was once impossible, or prohibitively difficult, to pull together. By incorporating Producer Services’ new capacities with Endur and gMotion, producers can greatly improve their back-office operations, eliminate data redundancy issues, as well as streamline every aspect of accounting, such as managing ownership changes in producing properties and calculating actual volumes to the custody transfer point on the pipeline.
What about recent developments in the financial sector?
Many financial institutions such as banks and hedge funds have entered or re-entered the energy market, providing a tremendous support for the added liquidity and credit facilities needed for a robust trading environment. This is also a good development for software vendors like OpenLink. As these financial institutions ramp up their energy trading operations, it is imperative that they leverage the best energy transaction management solutions available today. If they were to build their own proprietary systems, it would be extremely costly both in terms of the actual system development and the opportunity cost for the missed trading businesses.
Since OpenLink provides end-to-end solutions – with a robust trading and risk management core – we serve many major financial institutions, validating our continued commitment and investment in the energy markets.
Could you name some of your new banking clients?
You will see their names as we roll out the press releases. We are one of the few software companies that take our clients’ corporate communication policies very seriously – without exception.
Copyright © 2006 Incisive Media Investments Ltd.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
First published in Energy Risk - September 2006
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