SoftSmiths Announces New Electronic Trading Suite - SoftSmiths Exchange

Houston, TX. – April 11, 2006 – SoftSmiths, Inc., a leading energy software solutions and services company, today announced SoftSmiths Exchange Suite, a next generation platform of electronic trading system (ETS) applications for energy commodities, targeted at companies that operate exchanges, brokerage firms, financial institutions with private trading networks, as well as energy buyers such as public utilities and large industrials. Exchange Suite meets the need for new technology that supports cost-effective services, providing Auction, Negotiated, and Automated markets for trading forward and physical complex Energy products.  The Suite consists of three distinct ETS applications (Auction, Negotiation, and Market Match) deployable individually or as a single seamlessly integrated trading platform. Exchange Suite additionally provides risk measurement and decision support applications, enhancing trading opportunities and supporting optimal deal making. In addition to the Suite platform, SoftSmiths today announces the availability of the Exchange Auction Market for trading Power contracts.

Increasingly, energy market participants are seeking opportunities in the Power and Gas markets; driven by underlying demand, the supply situation, competition, and historic high price volatility. Traditional Trading Exchanges and market makers must continue to evolve to stay competitive and meet the demands of the marketplace. Electronic trading has facilitated the explosive growth in recent years of the energy markets, providing trading efficiencies, price transparency, and scalable platforms.  Trading volume in energy futures and options grew almost 14% in 2005 to 229.9 million contracts, according to the Futures Industry Assn. in Washington, D.C.  At the same time, local energy utility companies and large industrials, the two groups that purchase the bulk of electricity and natural gas for consumption, look to streamline their energy procurement. 

“Exchanges, brokers, market makers and energy utilities realize that today’s more challenging trading environment requires new technology that will help them operate their business more effectively and efficiently.”, said Nathan Sheik, CEO of SoftSmiths. “SoftSmiths Exchange helps customers meet this demand, by leveraging our software, intellectual property, and years of energy domain knowledge and electronic trading expertise.” 

SoftSmiths Exchange Auction Market is an electronic, real-time, interactive marketplace for auction-based transaction processing, enabling buyers and sellers to post customized auctions to ‘bidders’ who compete anonymously.  Auction Market allows industry participants, broker-dealers and their customers to request bids by listing specified energy positions, for sale or purchase, in defined energy products (NG, Power, Coal, Oil, etc.). Bids are placed in the auction book providing full anonymity and transparency to market participants, until final auction time and award. The auction engine uses interactive matching, providing buyers and sellers real-time price information. The Auction Market application delivers proven efficiencies of electronic market places, thereby opening up trading opportunities, reducing cost, and increasing volumes and trading profits. Auction Market presently supports transactions for Power, to be followed by additional energy commodities including Gas, Coal and Oil.

Building on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), SoftSmiths Exchange Suite comes with native support for web services and XML to facilitate quick integration with other applications, while providing the scalability and flexibility to enable fast response to changes.  SoftSmiths offers its Exchange Suite products as turnkey, private label and customized solutions, or on an ASP basis.

SoftSmiths Exchange Negotiated Market and Market Match products will be released in the near future. 

About SoftSmiths

SoftSmiths, Inc. delivers critical electronic energy trading and operations solutions and services that enable energy industry participants to enhance profitability and reliability in the competitive marketplace. 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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