Challenge: In the Trading arena, clients constantly want more advanced products and sophisticated services that require physical capabilities in the trade and marketing of energy and other commodities; all in a real-time environment where large transaction volumes are the norm.

Energy Trading and Marketing companies must provide liquidity and risk management to investors through a reliable trading environment. Traders often offer customized product solutions, as well as risk management products for physical and financial hedging.

An inflexible integration infrastructure in real-time trading operations can present many challenges and be costly to license and maintain. With clients demanding more advanced products and sophisticated services, there is a needed to reduce costs and integrate physical and financial end-to-end marketing and trading operations in a flexible and highly scalable way, without requiring custom programming and frequent intervention after its deployment.

A trade entered or executed in one system must be sent to a central entity that consolidates the overall position. Risk management systems need information from all of these. Trading systems specializing in different areas (e.g. natural gas, crude oil, gasoline) present data in different formats but must also be available to the risk management subsystem. Furthermore, components in the trading software infrastructure tend to be loosely integrated, resulting in a diverse landscape of third-party applications which sometimes even include spreadsheets. After de-regulation of natural gas wholesale and other energy markets, there is a pressing need to help guarantee controls in trading information, in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Stone Bond’s Solution: Enterprise Enabler® provides a broad spectrum of connectivity to hundreds of data sources, along with robust data transformation services that eliminate the constraints of the typical transformation engine, by handling all data in native form. This foundation of event-driven, real-time, data-streaming technology moves information efficiently through business processes, workflows, SOA and composite applications present in the trading floor.

Benefits: A large energy trading and marketing customer of Stone Bond has quickly reduced its exposure to risk in these areas with Enterprise Enabler® (EE), which allows an enterprise to integrate all systems in a fraction of the time required by other vendors, while providing a suite of tools that facilitate the management of the integration at a fraction of the cost.

Stone Bond swiftly implemented EE in a way that created a reusable and comprehensive framework to enhance and replace the end-to-end aging integration solution that was in place within the trading enterprise, while providing cost-effective ways to integrate information from very diverse sources and forms without custom programming.