Trading tool aids transactions

Like many companies that have developed IT systems and processes on an ad hoc basis, energy firm Powergen found it was taking a long time to process data and carry out transactions.

In April 2000, new regulations in the Energy Trading Agreement came into force. This compelled firms operating in the UK wholesale energy market to open up their resources to competitors. Powergen struggled to meet the demand this created, and found it was wasting time and money because its systems were slow.

Data came in from several bespoke systems that supported research and delivered results to traders. Andrew Bennett, senior developer at Powergen, adds, "We used to run a Visual Basic-based Oracle [architecture] in-house, but we realised this was a maintenance nightmare. Each client was fat and upgrading the applications was very problematic."

Powergen decided to improve matters by using Web services in the middleware, which meant it could have Java or Microsoft dot-Net technology at the front- and back-end. "At the time we did not know which to use, so we hedged our bets. Now, though we have chosen Java, we can still use Web services with dot-Net," says Bennett.

Powergen did not carry out a formal tendering process for a solution. "We did informal in-house evaluation of IBM's WebSphere against Borland's JBuilder," says Bennett. "WebSphere was a good product but we could not quite get it configured with the Web services. With Borland we were up and running fairly quickly. Borland supplied something we could use for testing, and we tried [the Web services protocol] Soap from the Internet and got that running smoothly."

After some research, Powergen decided to use Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) because of its ease of integration and flexibility. "The Borland enterprise server supports J2EE, and uses it to bring data out of different systems both internal and external," says Bennett. "We use Web services to expose a single view and deliver it to the systems. Web services can create a basic interface, the back-end pulls in all the information, then Web services act as a layer on top, allowing people to run simple requests on the information held."

Jon Harrison, senior technical consultant at development software specialist Borland, adds, "Powergen was facing a shake-up in the industry, new regulations were opening the door for the competition. Powergen realised that it was not competitive, because its information was often out of date and incorrect. Our project was to consolidate this information."

Powergen's resulting Java-based trading system has reduced the time it takes to complete energy trades from hours to a few minutes. It uses Web services and Java software in the J2EE architecture.

This Web services functionality is a big boon for the firm. "Web services let us tie our own applications together, all of which were developed in-house," Bennett explains. "It came at a convenient time for us. The development process has been quite long, so we have had to cope with a learning curve but on the whole we are pleased. Now we have a good suite of business methods."

Recently the system has had a few difficulties but Borland has provided support, so solutions were quickly found. In particular there were teething problems following an update to Borland's 5.02 application server. "But it was no show-stopper and we worked around the issues", says Bennett.

Looking to the future, Bennett indicates that Powergen is keen use more Web services. "We are about to launch a suite of applications into the live environment. If that gets a positive review then we will probably carry on using that technology. We are also keeping an eye on dot-Net technology to see what is on the other side of the fence. We will probably do that during a compare-and-contrast period."

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SUMMARY
Business need: Energy company Powergen wanted to unite bespoke applications, make data more widely available and speed up processes.

Technical considerations: The solution had to unite up to seven disparate systems, and provide up-to-date information online.

: A Java-based Web services system was set up with support from an application integration firm.