An Update with EGSSIS
For Belgium-based EGSSIS, the first lockdown passed better than expected according to Dries Lamont, Chief Growth Officer. The company was up and running from day 1 from home offices. “Business did slow down, and a lot of prospects put things on ice,” he said. “Some are now picking up where they left off and things are improving.” Overall though, Dries sees the lockdown as a ‘bit of a wake-up call’ for some companies who perhaps had reservations about the cloud model. Once, home office was mandated and business continuity became a priority, some companies made the move they had long resisted, he said. For example, they signed a new customer in Germany in the immediate aftermath of lockdown.
Actually, EGSSIS gained 4 new customers in the period, he told me. These included a Nordic energy trader, an eastern European company, one in Austria along with the German firm. Others put things on hold, he told me while 3 of the above 4 moved very quickly with very short sales cycles. “Companies are talking to us now that prior to the lockdown, wanted to keep everything in house,” he said. Having said that, there was no doubt that April and May were slow, but the summer saw the return of RFI’s and RFP’s he said.
Some of the resistance EGSSIS sees to cloud is around security. So it has been involved in gaining new certifications. In September, it announced it had passed the ISAE 3000, Type 1 SOC2 audit, which “ensures that a service organization keeps data private and secure while processing or in storage, and that data is accessible at any time.” EGSSIS continues to work to show that cloud is secure and provides a robust solution. Therefore, they are aiming to get ISO27001 certified by end of Q2 2021.
The company was also busy during the summer “as Enovos, who had been using EgssPort for gas operations since 2011, decided to use our SaaS to handle their power portfolio as well. This means their operations team can handle both commodities from the same intuitive platform.” As a part of that, EGSSIS implemented a number of new grids for them in 2020 including RTE – France, Amprion – Germany, 50hertz – Germany, TransnetBW – Germany, Tennet GmbH – Germany, and Creos – Luxembourg.
Another area of focus has been integrations to ETRM solutions and “we’re looking for more ‘out-of-the-box’ integrations via API to ETRM vendors,” he told me. “We’re talking to several of them and making progress in that regard.”
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