Mr. Rob Pringle, Director of Global IT, Gazprom Marketing & Trading
CTRM What’s next?
Rob Pringle is Director of Global IT for Gazprom Marketing & Trading with global responsibility for all aspects of IT delivery and operations for the organisation. Gazprom Marketing & Trading, part of the world’s largest natural gas company Gazprom, is headquartered in London and has subsidiaries in Houston, Singapore, Paris, Berlin and Manchester. It trades commodities such as natural gas, power, oil, carbon, LNG and foreign exchange and also retails energy to business consumers in the UK, France and Eire.
Rob has over 20 years of experience working in IT within the energy industry. After being sponsored by British Gas through a Business Administration and Computer Science degree, he joined them on graduation working on IT solutions for the liberalisation of the UK gas and electricity markets. Rob then moved to ABB and was responsible for marketing and developing energy retail and trading solutions for participants in the competitive energy markets. Prior to joining Gazprom Marketing & Trading, Rob spent 10 years with UK utility Centrica working in a number of different roles in the energy trading arena, and for his final four years was Head of Architecture for the Centrica Energy business unit. Rob joined Gazprom Marketing & Trading at the beginning of 2009.
Robert C. Bellemare, P.E., C.B.A., COO and Managing Director
Robert C. Bellemare PE, CBA, COO UtiliPoint International, Inc, has nearly twenty five years experience in the electric power business including being responsible for wholesale energy operations and trading. As managing director of an energy services company he oversaw the wholesale purchasing and retail pricing activities in several deregulated states and served on the corporate risk management committee for the parent utility. He has developed advanced generation dispatch algorithms for managing the fuel, transmission, and generation constraints for multi-area, multi-region 14,000 MW operation and has been responsible for executing spot as well as term deals in several regions. Mr. Bellemare has also developed generator economic models, performed asset valuation analyses, and developed fuel procurement and contract models. He has managed two of the nation’s largest solar and wind energy research projects and worked as an engineer at one of the country’s largest coal/oil power plants. Mr. Bellemare was co-lead of the unregulated business merger integration team for the AEP-CSW merger. Mr. Bellemare was recently published in Forbes Magazine and holds a Master’s Degree in electric power engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, is a registered Professional Engineer, and is a Certified Business Appraiser.
Dr. Gary M. Vasey, Executive Director at Ezpada s.r.o.
Back to the future: Vanilla CTRM
Dr. Gary M. Vasey is an energy industry expert with over 28-years experience in the energy and utilities industry. He currently is Executive Director with Prague-based proprietary power trader Ezpada sro.
He is a noted expert on the energy trading, transaction and risk management software industry and an accomplished industry analyst and thought leader.
Gary has published more than 200 articles on energy and utility industry trends in a variety of publications, is a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the co-editor of the UtiliPoint book Trends in Energy Trading, Transaction and Risk Management Software – A Primer. Most recently he contributed the two chapters to The Professional Risk Managers‘ Guide to Energy and Environmental Markets published by PRMIA and two chapters, co-written with Peter C. Fusaro, to Weather, Energy and Environmental Hedging – An Introduction (ICFAI University Press, 2007) edited by Amando F C Da Silva.
Gary is also the co-founder of the Energy Hedge Fund Center (www.energyhedgefunds.com) and the co-author of Energy & Environmental Hedge Funds – The New Investment Paradigm (Wiley, 2006) with Peter C. Fusaro and of many trade press articles on hedge funds in the energy industry.
Gary holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Geological Sciences from the University of Aston in Birmingham, England and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
Mr. Michal Skalka, Director Trading, CEZ Group
“Trends and issues in current ETRM systems”
Michal Skalka has been working for ČEZ, a. s. from 2005 as Director of Trading and member of several management committees within CEZ Group. He is responsible for all of ČEZ Group’s wholesale energy trading activities across markets of Central and Eastern Europe covering power, emissions and also coal and gas commodities. Trading activities include asset-backed trading of nuclear, lignite and hard coal assets as well as proprietary trading and sales portfolios procurement. Michal Skalka is an expert in energy and derivatives transacting, risk management, ETRM systems and settlement processes. Prior to joining ČEZ, Michal worked for the international audit and consultancy firm Deloitte as manager for ETRM services (Energy Transactions and Risk Management). First in the Management Consulting department in the Czech Republic, then in the Treasury & Capital Markets in the Netherlands and finally back in Central Europe in the Capital Markets department.
Michal gained his Engineering degree in Information Technology at the University of Economics, Faculty of Information Technology and Statistics, Prague, Czech Republic with additional study at the University of Stirling, Dept. of Computing Science, U.K.
Patrick Reames, Managing Director of CommodityPoint
CTRM – From Here to the Horizon
Leveraging CommodityPoint’s extensive library of CTRM technology research, this presentation will look at:
- The current state of the CTRM technology landscape
- Near-term influences impacting CTRM technology including global market developments and regulatory mandates
- Views from the market – What do market participants say they need in order to be successful
- Emerging trends in CTRM technology
Mr. Reames has more than 30 years of energy industry experience. He has a deep understanding, developed through hands-on experience and managerial oversight, of upstream and midstream oil and gas operations including exploration, production, gathering, gas plant operations and pipeline operations. Additionally, he has 5 years of energy commodity trading, transportation, and risk management experience with Hess Corp. (formally known as Amerada Hess), a Fortune 100 integrated energy marketing company. Over the last twelve years, he has been focused primarily on information technology serving energy trading, marketing, and risk management. Prior to joining UtiliPoint in 2006, Mr. Reames served as an executive for several technology companies (including TransEenrgy Management, Altra Energy, and TradeWell Systems) providing products and services to energy trading and marketing organizations. In these roles, his focus was on the creation and delivery of innovative, high value service products designed to ensure the successful implementation and on-going use of technology solutions.
Patrick is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events. He has published numerous articles in industry publications and contributes regularly to the UtiliPoint’s IssueAlert and CommodityPoint CommodityAlert series. He also contributes to the industry leading CTRM Blog and website (www.CTRMBlog.com) and is the co-author of the books “Selecting and Implementing Energy Trading, Transaction and Risk Management Software – A Primer” and “Trends in Energy Trading, Transaction and Risk Management Software – Second Edition”.
John Herd is Divisional CIO at Glencore, responsible for Oil, Gas and Freight Trading IT
CTRM: Dead or Alive?
How does the CTRM concept stack up in today’s business and IT environment? Do companies really want (or need) a one-stop shop for Commodity Trading and Risk Management or would they prefer something more lightweight and adaptable? How do the offerings of the CTRM vendors match the differing requirements of the teams involved in commodity trading and what does this mean for the vendors themselves? These and other related questions will be addressed in a presentation that seeks to answer whether the CTRM application concept is the way forward or heading for the history books.
John has been with Glencore since 2009 having previously been with Shell Trading for 8 years where he looked over Applications Development and Support. Prior to entering the world of commodities, John spent 10 years at JPMorgan Asset Management implementing a variety of programs responsible for delivering STP into the organisation and is passionate about eradicating inefficiency in the transaction life cycle and delivering real value to the business. Outside of the office, John is a keen cyclist (and was long before it became the “new golf”) but gave up any hopes of winning the Tour De France at an early age!
Vis Prabhakaran, Global Head of Risk at Armajaro Trading Limited
Risk Management in the Agricultural commodity supply chain: A CTRM Perspective
Vis Prabhakaran is a Risk management professional with over ten years of experience in various aspects of risk in leading investment banks, regulatory body and most recently in a commodity firm. Currently dealing with market, credit and counterparty risk of physicals in the softs commodity space. Vis is currently the Global Head of Risk at Armajaro Trading Limited. He has also worked as the General Manager, Risk Management for Olam International; was the Assistant Director for the Monetary Authority of Singapore; was the Vice President in the Risk Management Group for Merrill Lynch Japan and was an Associate of the Financial Applications Delivery Group at JPMorgan Chase.
Mr. Zenon Gray, Head of IS, ED&F Man
