SoftSmiths  Spurs Innovation of ISO/RTO Market Participant Solutions

Houston, TX. – February 21, 2006 –  SoftSmiths, Inc., today outlined how its growing SoftSmiths Market suite is helping ISO/RTO Market participants solve their top-ranked challenge: navigating evolving ISO/RTO Market requirements in a cost-effective way. SoftSmiths Markets is a next-generation market participant solution to interact with Independent System Organizations (ISO) and Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO). 

Market participants have been challenged by systems that are “hand-stitched” and implemented using a black-box approach, and require a costly army of analysts and developers to maintain or change. Having learned that markets constantly change, they now require software systems with flexible architectures that help to quickly and cost-effectively navigate those changes, allowing market participants to instead focus on how their business practices and procedures need to be adapted to accommodate market changes.

SoftSmiths Markets meets that demand. It is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and based on open, industry standards and technology, thereby significantly reducing the cost and complexity. This architecture also promotes other objectives, such as greater flexibility to enable faster response to change and acceleration of new development by reusing existing services.

"Buyers will seek a multi-market platform that offers the flexibility to handle the differences while offering a high degree of uniformity so that users can focus on their business", said Hugo Stappers, Director of Sales and Marketing at SoftSmiths. "SoftSmiths Markets accommodates the differences between markets, while it capitalizes on the common concepts. It prevents market participants from getting locked into a closed software architecture that is not flexible to adapt to the inevitable changes in market procedures and interfaces".

SoftSmiths Markets offers the Market Participant options that reinforce the flexibility they expect today. For example, SoftSmiths Markets is database independent, including the cost-effective Open Source database MySQL. Also SoftSmiths Markets can be deployed on-site at the customer's facility or remotely hosted by SoftSmiths. For those markets where the scheduling communication requires Electronic Tagging, SoftSmiths can augment its SoftSmiths markets solution with its fully NERC-compliant E-Tag application.

SoftSmiths Markets provides three primary functions:

• Automates the submission of energy and ancillary service schedules, and bids and offers, to the ISO/RTO;

• Estimates ISO/RTO charges in a shadow settlement; and

• Consolidates ISO/RTO market information into a single database.

These functions will increase the effectiveness of market participant operations by decreasing the time required:

• To submit information to the ISO; and

• To resolve billing charges with the ISO

Leveraging SoftSmiths' SOA based e-Link integration application, SoftSmiths Markets easily integrates with energy transaction and management systems to further help manage these energy transactions.

Further benefiting its multi-market platform, SoftSmiths Markets features a highly intuitive user interface, allowing quick user adoption and easy cross training across different disciplines.

About SoftSmiths

SoftSmiths is a leading provider of proven business critical Transaction Management Systems and services for Load Serving Entities, Generation Production Entities, Purchasing Selling Entities, and Transmission Providers who operate in physical markets to sell, purchase, trade, and deliver energy in the most efficient and cost- effective way. SoftSmiths’ seamlessly integrated, scalable, and adaptable solutions provide ready-to-deploy, out-of-the-box functionality that is highly configurable and customizable to meet companies' unique needs. SoftSmiths' proven solutions and in-depth knowledge of the industry's business practices allow its customers to automate manual processes, eliminate redundancies, and increase business visibility across the enterprise to allow faster decision making and more informed decisions, thereby improving profitability, operational efficiencies and cash flow. The company has been successfully delivering e-business solutions to energy service companies since 1997.

SoftSmiths is a registered trademark of SoftSmiths, Inc.

Contact Information:

SoftSmiths Inc.
Hugo Stappers
Phone:    713.626.9184
Fax:          713.626.0186
Email:      mkt@softsmiths.com
Website:  www.softsmiths.com

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