Drillinginfo Innovates Curves-as-a-Service Adding Fuel to the Move to Ecosystems
A recent announcement by Drillinginfo caught my interest. It announced something called Curves-as-a-Service. This provides a fully managed forward curve building service designed specifically for energy and commodity companies that can be either integrated with visualization tools, analytics platforms, and other downstream systems, alternately, it can also be deployed as a standalone solution. The solution “automates the collection of input data, includes the user’s business logic, runs the curve calculations, and distributes the curves to the user’s desired target system in real time with a transparent audit trail and detailed quality checks,” according to the companies press announcement.
“CaaS is the newest addition to Drillinginfo’s powerful Commodity Data Solutions suite. It leverages the award-winning MarketView Desktop™ platform and DataGenic CurveBuilder technology to create real-time and end-of-day curves that combine market data and business logic to deliver an unbiased view of an agreed price between the buyers and sellers of a commodity that will be delivered at a future date.
CaaS curves are created and managed by the Drillinginfo’s global Managed Services team that has 10 years of curve-building experience and produces more than 10 million curves every day. Their expertise provides users with an unbiased view of best practices for their curves.”
AdvertisingAdvertising“Providing our customers with real-time curves that tap into our vast databases, plus the ability to store and incorporate proprietary data, strikes a balance between delivering all the information they need and doing so quickly in order to make smart decisions and capitalize on opportunities faster,” said Jeff Chapman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Commodity Data Solutions, Drillinginfo. “We handle all of the work that goes into building and maintaining curves so our customers can focus their time and energy on making money and providing greater transparency to the entire organization.”
The full announcement can be seen here.
The announcement taps into a couple of trends that we think that we are seeing emerge.
- First, the idea of discrete packages of deep vertical or broad horizontal functionality brought to market in a way that it can be deployed as an add on solution either integrated or stand-alone. We fully expect this trend towards what we now call ecosystems to gradually, but relentlessly, provide buyers with the ability to disaggregate their monolithic CTRM solutions. A cost effective and rapidly implemented service that offers deep vertical or broad horizontal capabilities at a reasonable cost and in a way that it can be integrated fairly rapidly, can create the opportunity for a gradual erosion of dependency on a single costly solution from a single supplier that the users are dependent upon for upgrades and future support. Alternatively, it can be used as a point solution stand-alone to solve a specific problem. We see lots of evidence for this trend emerging from suppliers like Eka, Gen10, CTRMCloud, Molecule, TRADESPARENT, Brady, and many others. Each might have a slightly different overall approach, but the net result ought to be more choice for buyers and increased flexibility and agility for the users.
- Secondly, the idea of essentially ‘outsourcing’ parts of the business is another trend that we begin to see emerging especially in areas like auto trading, scheduling and operations. It to some extent goes hand-in-hand with RPA where certain monotonous low value processes can be automated by bots. It helps users get their costs down, increase efficiencies and stay focussed on the high value activities.
It is this sort of innovation that is helping to drive change throughout and beyond the CTRM software space often utilizing newer and more agile technologies driven by a need to be more cost effective and more agile.
