ZE held its second User Forum and Conference in Vancouver, BC, in October. The event brought together industry and information technology experts to discuss issues involving Enterprise Data Management (EDM) in connection with risk management in energy and commodities trading. EDM and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) conference addressed various angles of the issue. Different participants and […]
ZE is excited to join industry experts at the 2011 Allegro Customer Summit from October 17th – October 19th at the Westin Stonebriar just outside of Dallas, Texas. This three day event will cover the energy sectors most important themes from regulatory compliance to commodity risk and will give ZE the opportunity to showcase its […]
As regulators around the world debate systemic risk – focusing on the risk/reward proposition of market activity on the economic system – enterprises are increasingly focusing on managing enterprise risk and satisfying shareholder concerns that their investments are safe. Modern enterprises have evolved into complex systems of smaller, separate corporations and/or business units located in […]
I sit in a lot of sales calls and I was recently in a meeting with a prospective client in which we were asked if we “cleanse” market data as part of our service offering. This is a question that I hear a lot and unfortunately is an indication that there is a good deal of confusion within the market about what data cleansing really means. In this case, what the client was really asking was whether we correct market data that is issued from data vendors such as Platts, GFI, Argus, ICE, etc. The short answer to this question is “no” we don’t “cleanse” market data in this context and truth be told, nobody should be or is allowed to independently change 3rd party market data on behalf of the client. There is however, a process for handling data issues and errors.
I recently attended an energy trade and risk management conference in London and had the fortune of seeing first-hand the realities of our interconnected world and its effect on managing risk. The Tunisian and Egyptian governments had just fallen in the face of popular uprisings and Libya seemed to be on the verge of a civil war. Blackberries were buzzing full time all around me as companies wanted to know their exposure to this unexpected risk that was unfolding in North Africa and had the potential to spill over to the Middle East. Compiling this uncertainty, we are now faced with the prospect of a nuclear meltdown at several reactors following the catastrophic earthquake in Japan.
As Gensler and the Democrats continue to face off against the Republicans and Wall Street over the consequences of the Dodd-Frank Act, one thing is clear; corporations will continue to try to mitigate their exposure to risk through greater oversight of the information they handle and process. This is not simply because they had trouble figuring out their real risk exposure during the collapse of the financial markets in 2008, but also due to the greater transparency required in their transactions, and new incentives for whistleblowers to turn them in.
Events in Egypt and the potential for this unrest to overflow to the neighboring regions sparked a disturbance among commodity analysts. A lot of analysts kindly added fuel to the public speculations that energy markets were facing a tremendous blow. Some of them were seeing the danger resulting from cuts in oil production in the Middle East. Others […]
Last week I attended Distributech 2011 in San Diego. What I came away with was the sense that we are well on the way to sorting out the many operational complexities associated with installing and connecting millions of smart meters across the country. Demand response, time of use billing, outage management and ways of tying in renewables are all well on their way to becoming entrenched as standard operational functions. So what is the next stage in the development of the Smart Grid?
Join our free Enterprise Data Management (EDM) workshop happening January 14th, 2011 in New York City. This workshop will review the challenges of data management and systems integration within the complexity of the energy and commodities market. The workshop will provide an educational environment for market participants to be able to understand the challenges and […]
With so many solution offerings in the data space, it is often difficult to differentiate the value proposition between them. At a first glance, the ZEMA Suite™ may look similar to other data management solutions on the market, but once clients get a deeper look, they quickly find out how unique and empowering ZEMA really […]