Awards

ZE PowerGroup
Data Management House of the Year
turf of North America blanketed. It is especially strong in independent system operator (ISO) coverage, according to Waleed El-Ramly, chief operating o cer, product development at ZE PowerGroup. We capture data from across the board gas, crude, weather, nancials, and then the power depth is amazing. ats because we were lucky enough to start o with the power markets, which are the most complicated, and then moved into the simpler markets. Even though gas is a very important commodity, the amount of information the gas markets produce is much less than the power markets produce, he says. ZEMA captures prices, demand, congestion, forecasts, imports, exports, transmission data, supply and generation data. is market data can be captured in real-time on an

he exibility of ZE PowerGroups data management o ering, breadth of data feeds, and ease of integration into the downstream systems of both large and small clients, combined with strength of client testimonials, has won the company Energy Risks Data Management House of the Year for the third year running. Last year ZE PowerGroup doubled its client-base for the second year in a row. Key to its success, say its clients, is the ease with which its ZEMA suite of products interfaces with other systems. Most software vendors download the data to their own servers, and then feed it directly to their clients. ZE PowerGroup o ers an on-site licence model giving companies the software to download data and allowing them to receive data directly from the relevant market. e exibility of this approach has meant the software is now in use by rms as diverse as oil companies, hedge funds, industrials, agriculture traders, metals traders and utilities. Once the data comes in, a company can choose how they want to present it. John Streett, director of IT ETRM systems at Iberdrola Renewables nds this a de nite bene t. e data comes into our ZE database, but then I can either use the ZE suite of tools to present that, which is what most of the users use, but if I need to interface it to another system internally, I can. ats one of the biggest bene ts over its competitors. One, I can have it in-house, two, I can directly connect and interface with other systems, he says. e ease of interfacing with other systems is important for many rms that want to keep their options open

Data Management House of the Year

for how they manage their data in future, according to Ed Ho er, IT specialist at Shell Energy Services. ere are some other third-party vendors out there that have viable solutions, the biggest downside though is that if we ever wanted to expand on those solutions with our own internal data, it requires a lot of overhead to get that data into those systems, because it is proprietary storage, he says. Open architecture on the other hand, means that the database dictionary is made available to clients,

We capture data from across the board the power depth is amazing
Waleed El-Ramly, ZE PowerGroup

so that the raw tables and views can be accessed directly and extracted to wherever the client wants. As well as existing connectivity to Oracle, ZEMA has undergone a year-long conversion to support the Microsoft SQL Server. is lets the company market its system to smaller clients who cannot support Oracle. e system is infrastructure and operating system agnostic and is simple to integrate with downstream systems. rough building custom views or triggers to shape and push data onto their systems, clients can integrate ZEMA with their trade, risk and settlement processes. In terms of the market information itself, ZEMA can import from about 2,500 data feeds at present, from Australia, Singapore, the UK, Europe and South America, and has its home

up-to-the-minute basis, with no delay between capture and availability to the user. e data can be of any frequency, including by the second, hourly, daily or weekly sources, and clients can manage their own download schedules. It can also be used to download and display non-time series data, such as events and outage noti cations, nancial transmission and congestion revenue rights, and is used by some clients to access back-o ce data. e systems graphic user interface is simple enough for those without a programming background, but also has analytic capabilities for the advanced user, such as multi-source comparisons, extrapolations, forward-curve plotting, and near-month analysis. Outside data capture, the ZEMA suite can be used to provide business process automation. June 2011

Reprinted from EnergyRisk