The new generation of ETRM systems A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
CONTIGO ’ S APPROACH
Contigo is a fairly recent addition to the ETRM and related software market offering a variety of applications to the European energy industry . Increasingly known for ease of implementation , and having been in existence long enough ( since 2006 ) to have garnered a strong and vibrant customer base and solid brand awareness , its solutions are available hosted in the cloud or traditionally installed . This means that Contigo has more modern software developed on a coherent web-enabled architecture but that it has added sufficient functionality to be broadly applicable to European energy markets and to perhaps lead in some of those markets .
Commodity Technology has been in the position of following Contigo as an analyst firm for many years watching the company grow and broaden its geographic and functional reach across the market place . The company ’ s founders , having worked in the industry for years prior to launching the business , had years of experience developing and implementing third-party and internally developed software . Applying “ lessons learned ”, this team adopted a particular set of architectural principles from day one : / Simple architecture based on an application server , a windows service and database , / All user access via a web browser , / Designed to handle large volumes of time series data quickly , / All data accessible via SQL , / Majority of functionality accessible via web services
API , / Same architecture for deployed and hosted customers , / Designed for extensibility to all “ plug ins ”, / Designed for integration using managed ‘ worker ’ services ,
/ Consistent and flexible user interface , / Processing should be real-time and not rely on end of day process .
One of the differentiators from day one was their decision that all trades , positions , and curves hold volume , price and so on , were captured and maintained in the system as time series data – and the system is continuously optimized to ensure such data can be imported rapidly . The time series data is held at the granularity of the specific commodity based on calendars such as 15-minute , half-hourly allowing summations of data to any level but , more importantly , it becomes much easier to aggregate , slice and dice data , which is exactly what users require . This is an example of how design can impact usability and performance providing differentiation in the process .
Integration is also a key concern as ETRM solutions must aggregate data from , and send data to , a large number of other systems within the enterprise . Contigo ’ s integration framework is a good example of how vendors tackle this problem with more modern ap-
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