OpenLink Announces Availability of Russian Energy Market Implementation Accelerators

Verification for robust, agile Packaged Market Models confirmed by market participants at recent industry event held in Moscow

MOSCOW--(BUSINESS WIRE)--OpenLink Financial, LLC (OpenLink), a leading provider of energy, commodities, trading, and risk management (CTRM/ETRM) solutions, which support the entire transaction lifecycle, recently had their advanced implementation market acceleration packages validated at an energy industry event in Moscow, Russia. The event was sponsored by the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, and included senior energy and commodities industry professionals focused on assessing supply and demand dynamics for the Russian power markets.

The newly released Market Model for the Russian power market was perceived by attendees as a necessity for capitalizing on opportunities in this market. Attendees commented on how this robust flexible Market Model will tackle their key challenges including:

• Support for all 28 regions and their unique price zones, all in one model
• Ability to replace highly scientific, complicated models with localized standard solutions
• Capabilities to address both immediate and long term strategic decision processes
• A strong need for flexibility and ease of use with aggregated decision support data

OpenLink has historically developed solutions and modifications so local market participants can take advantage of emerging trends. Key customization required for the Russian power market included adhering to specific regulations, translations of GUIs into the Russian language, and specific support for electric energy export/import operations.

This Market Model complements OpenLink’s previously released Turkish Power Market Model, which supports the unique supply-demand balancing requirements for the Turkish power market, as well as price forecasting for the initiation of the day-ahead market, which began on December 1, 2011.

Dr. Markus Seiser, Managing Director of OpenLink’s Eastern European Division, noted, “We are pleased to be a trusted advisor for this emerging market. Market participants were able to validate the premise behind our robust, agile Market Model. We are confident our growing Russian clients will be able to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the projection capabilities, integration for cross-regional portfolio evaluation and optimization, and near real-time decision support and market communication.”

Kevin Hesselbirg, CEO of OpenLink added, “Our previous experience with emerging markets and our early investment in the Russian power market has positioned OpenLink to best serve market participants as they adapt to operating in a more transparent and liquid market regime. As participants await the potential opening of the Russian gas market, we will look to use our past experiences to offer similar solution suites to mitigate uncertainties and benefit from potential market opportunities.”

To further aid market participants interested in the Russian market, OpenLink launched a Russian language website demonstrating their global suite of solutions, which are designed to fulfill currently required functionality, and are agile enough to meet any emerging needs of these markets and regions as they evolve. To learn more please visit: http://www.olf.com/RUSSIA

About OpenLink

Founded in 1992, OpenLink provides decision support software solutions for transaction lifecycle management. This encompasses financial and physical cross-asset trading, risk management, related operations processing and portfolio management for commodity, energy and financial services markets and industries globally.

OpenLink's client base of more than 540 clients worldwide includes 12 of the top 25 largest commodity and energy companies by market capitalization, eight of the largest financial institutions and 11 of the largest central banks, as well as major hedge funds, commodities companies and public utilities.

Headquartered on Long Island, New York and with offices in New York City, Houston, Dallas, Tulsa, London, Berlin, Vienna, São Paulo, Sydney, Singapore, Moscow and Toronto, and Dubai. OpenLink has more than 1,300 employees worldwide.