Previse Systems Innovating Market Share

Previse Systems are rapidly making a name for themselves, and not just in Europe, if the results of our recent Vendor Perception Study are anything to go by. Previse is an innovative new entrant in the ETRM software market founded by a team of industry veterans. As I had written a few years ago,

“Paradigm is often overused word, but Previse Systems can be truly said to be breaking it when it comes to ETRM software. The team all have strong backgrounds in ETRM having worked for existing vendors. It is that experience that drove them to go back to the drawing board and rethink the entire issue of ETRM software. The result is an in the cloud, all new technology initiative that has separated out ETRM into three distinct elements;

1. A user-owned common trade repository (called ChorusLink) where each trade is stored and accessible by all parties to the trade in a fast and secure environment,
2. A high-performance position application (called Coral) that delivers the ability to quickly and easily visualize, and process large volumes of data, and
3. An app store-like platform (Coral Ecosystem) where third-parties can offer incremental and purpose-built functionality that can easily be added to the customers’ ecosystem and provides choice and competitive prices.”

I spoke last week with Marc Zumstein of Previse Systems to find out how things were going. It now has a handful of customers but has just won a couple of significant and large customers replacing another vendor in the process at one of those, he told me, and it has a very active pipeline with a handful more opportunities close to deciding. For Previse Systems, this represents two major milestones in its evolution in that it is starting to win both replacement projects and public tenders, he told me. It is also hiring people, of course, and has just added two people to the team in recent weeks.

Previse Systems is adding incremental functionality as it goes and “we can replace infrastructural elements of our solution without users even noticing,” Marc told me. This gives it a lot of flexibility to grow and adapt with market needs and he believes this to be a true differentiator and that “it implies there will never be an upgrade project in the future.” One area that Previse is working on right now is US power. It already has a customer using it for basic US power but Previse has opted to approach this using different market models for different regions (Power and natural gas in the EU and USA mainly for now). “Rather than try to force fit one market into a model designed for another market within our solution like many others have done, we are ensuring that we reflect the specifics of each market in the solution,” he told me. Essentially, the user will see this as templates for different markets.

Previse also innovated with the use of an App store (though other vendors also utilize this approach) and Marc says that it is making significant progress in that area. Users can develop Apps within their own environment and release them and updates as they enhance their Apps. “We have seen a lot of enthusiasm for this approach,” he said. Examples of such Apps developed by third parties are shown on the Previse website.

As regards the market overall, Marc sees the ongoing situation in Ukraine as keeping everyone on edge with the potential for a lot of unforeseen events taking place including political intervention in markets in the form of price caps and so on. He also sees nuclear energy generation potentially making a bit of a comeback to act as a counterbalance to the intermittent nature of renewables.