Southern Energy Installs 300 BT Trading Positions To Build Modern Energy Trading Floor
Southern Energy Inc., a unit of Southern Company, develops, builds, owns and operates power production and delivery facilities, and provides a broad range of services to utilities and industrial companies around the world. Southern Energy supplies energy in 10 countries on four continents. Its Southern Company Energy Marketing unit, a joint venture with Vastar Resources Inc., provides energy trading, marketing and financial services and other energy-related commodities, products and services to customers in North America.
The installation is part of an overall move to update the trading infrastructure at Southern Company Energy Marketing which trades in electricity, oil, natural gas and weather derivatives. "We elected to replace our existing trading platform with BT's trading technology because our traders need to access a variety of market information fast. BT's architecture and products provide flexible, high-performance processing power and bandwidth to match the demands of our new, state-of-the-art energy trading facility," said Martin Brannon, facilities manager at Southern Energy.
"When we go live with the new floor in December, our traders will have the same trading capabilities as some of the world's largest financial services firms. Besides BT's integrated PBX capability, including fully functional voice mail services, our traders will have the latest computer telephony integration software available. An added benefit to
Southern is the fact that the BT system uses less real estate on traders' desks," added Brannon.
Since its inception in 1997, Southern Company Energy Marketing has increased marketed gas volume to more than five billion cubic feet per day and electricity volume to more than 185 million megawatt-hours. This consistent growth led to the company's decision to build a whole new trading center based on BT's fully digital architecture that guarantees connections between trader and market.
The floor will be equipped with BT's ITS platform 98 switch designed to bring fast, flexible and reliable communications to the trading room infrastructure. Traders will use BT's pV405i soft-key turrets, eight channel speakers and ITS intercoms. In addition, BT's integrated suite of management software, ITSprofile, will allow trading room managers to make configuration changes to turrets and trader profiles from any computer on the network.
"In anticipation of Southern's continued growth, SCEM bought the industry's latest digital technology to give it room to expand and the architecture to accommodate new features it will add in the coming years," said Elizabeth Edwards, marketing manager of trading systems for BT North America.
Edited by Stephen Heiser