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UtiliPoint® International Announces
New IT Benchmarking and Consulting Services

For Immediate Release

March 2, 2005—HOUSTON—UtiliPoint® International is launching a new set of training and consulting services targeted at wholesale and retail energy marketing firms in conjunction with its new affiliate company, ENSIGHT Advisors. The two firms will provide IT benchmarking and consulting services including assessment of an organization's technology requirements, pre-software selection, implementation training, application integration framework design and implementation of system interfaces. It will also be conducting two new key industry surveys in the coming months.

Recent UtiliPoint® research on IT Benchmarking at North American Power Marketers has demonstrated high turnover rates for energy trading, transaction and risk management (ETRM) systems, a high proportion of poorly integrated heterogeneous application landscapes and higher than expected total cost of ownership. Today's business and regulatory environment elevates effective trading, transaction and risk management tools to the level of mission critical toolsets and with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance projects winding down, a new round of software selection exercises is expected.

“UtiliPoint® routinely follows the ETRM software markets as an analyst service,” said Gary M Vasey, Ph.D., UtiliPoint's®vice president of Trading & Risk Management. “When combined with our ongoing IT and application benchmarking surveys, we know that we can add significant value through providing training, pre-selection exercise consulting and IT benchmarking services. ENSIGHT Advisors provide the practical implementation expertise, business process application and requirements definition and thus add best practice capabilities.”

UtiliPoint® will be repeating its annual benchmarking of North American power marketers this summer and launching a new survey to benchmark natural gas producers, wholesale and retail marketers, and end users. The two firms will offer online and private seminars to clients looking to understand best practices and successful approaches to software selection and implementation as well as providing short proprietary IT and application benchmark consulting projects.

“ETRM software has matured rapidly over the last several years but organizations will benefit from briefings on the current state of the software market, best practice selection and implementation techniques and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued the industry,” reports Kevin Rose, principal, ENSIGHT Advisors.

For more information, please contact Gary M. Vasey, Ph.D. at gvasey@utilipoint.com or 281.681.8020 or Kevin R. Rose at krose@utilipoint.com or 713.896.3003.