New enhancements and future technology is the centerpiece of this year's Ascent users' group conference.  The company has been on a disciplined road map toward migrating all of its application to a .net platform and the wisdom of its approach shows not only in the application architecture, but also the functionality enhancements made along the way. 

The users group conference brought together customers of Solarc's energy trading and risk management (ETRM) solution from the energy industry, transportation, food processing and other industries.  New to Solarc in the last few years is the addition of financial service customers.  Yes, these companies are still buying ETRM and are looking for applications to be installed in short order.

We got a bird's eye view of what was important to Solarc's users through a survey we conducted prior to the event.  In the coming year, companies are planning to make moderate or strong investment in all categories of risk management - including risk management, real-time visibility to position, counterparty risk, trading limits, and risk analytics,  From a commodity perspective, companies want to beef up their capabilities in energy derivatives.  That's a good thing for vendors because the survey respondents also believe that vendor capabilities are high in that area.  The trading desk will also see more investment, especially in block and tackle of integrating with trading exchanges, deal capture, as well as trading data and price curves.

There was also interest in logistics, such as pipeline nominations.  Solarc will be releasing new functionality built in .NET – it's currently in beta test -  which includes greater functionality in this area, especially as it relates to scheduling refined products through a pipeline nominations exchange called Transport 4.    There's also some integration with Veson Nautical which should help oil and gas companies deal with shipping management issues such as demurrage.  Enhancements to valuation make it easier to drill down to the calculations behind the valuation.  There is also a neat cascading update where a change in a forward curve using an exchange price plus a basis triggers an updated valuation.  Users can see what deals the price change affected. 

Solarc has been on a very disciplined path to the migration of their application onto the .NET platform since 2005.  We have been impressed at the ability of the company to chart a development course and stick with it.  Not only has the architecture been updated to a service oriented architecture, but Solarc has updated and enhanced functionality.  This is exactly what the company demonstrated with the logistics and valuation enhancements described above.  We have seen so many  other efforts that have not been able to do this in parallel and in the end, they fall behind in either technology refresh or functionality development. 

There is some goodness yet to come as Solarc demonstrate some future visions based on their partnership with Microsoft.  The company has been experimenting with mash-up technology, paring Virtual Maps with storage inventory and basis price for a birds eye visualization of actual pipeline and storage, plus the data associated with it.  Other technologies that Solarc is exploring include portals that can be personalized to display information graphically and high performance computing.  Solarc acquired some surface computing and is now trying to figure out what applicability it can have for trading.  We know that traders' operate pretty independently, but surface computing has potential for schedulers working together or with traders to collaborate.