Ensights Toolkit

Energiewerks Ensights toolkit

The Energiewerks toolkit is a loosely coupled, cohesive set of data, infrastructure, numerical programming and information visualization tools used by technologists and quantitative analysts to disseminate insights and reports within an organization. The toolkit implements the Ensights Analytics Process.  Ensights Toolkit  autonomously aggregates data from public, proprietary and internal data sources. Normalizes and stores data to a data lake.  The data in the data lake is then available through a myriad of self-serve environments and tools to different users conducting various functions within an organization.

ensights-in-a-nutshell

These functions span fundamental analysis, technical analysis, derivative pricing, systematic trading, risk management, mid – office and back office functions. The system caters to personnel with varying levels of programming expertise – from programmers to analysts only conversant with Excel.  Various data access mechanisms span API access, rest services, excel downloads, csv dumps, mash-ups, self-serve business intelligence tools,  enterprise and analytical applications.

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Deployment Configurations

The Energiewerks Ensights Toolkit is available in three flavors:

  • Energiewerks Ensights Shared – a hosted managed platform running on cloud-based (AWS) or hybrid cloud infrastructure shared by individual proprietary traders, hedge funds, and small trading firms who do not need custom analytics.

  • Energiewerks Ensights Managed – a hosted managed platform running on cloud-based (AWS) or hybrid cloud infrastructure dedicated to a particular customer

  • Energiewerks Ensights Enterprise – an on-premise enterprise platform running within customer data center.

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Energiewerks Ensights Shared

Entry level Shared Analytics Infrastructure, Data, Technology and Process

The shared managed platform is the entry level deployment of the Energiewerks Ensights platform.  This instance is owned and operated by Energiewerks.  Only Energiewerks developed solutions are deployed on this instance and made available to independent traders, hedge funds, and small/upstart trading operations within large companies.  Customers sign up for the various services provided by Energiewerks in a multi-tenant setting wherever feasible so that the service ( and associated costs ) are shared by multiple customers.

This flavor is favored by independent traders, hedge funds, small trading firms and new entrants into markets covered by Energiewerks so as to gain quick entry or take advantage of short-term opportunities in commodity markets.

Some of the functional areas currently covered by this constantly improving flavor of the Energiewerks platform span fundamental and technical analysis for various commodity markets, trade capture, risk management, operations, pricing, portfolio optimization.  Some of the commodities currently supported include natural gas, natural gas liquids (ngls), crude oil and refined products.

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Energiewerks Ensights Managed

Dedicated and Managed Cloud-Based Analytics Infrastructure, Data, Technology and Process

The hosted managed platform is used to couple Energiewerks supplied analytics with custom analytics developed specifically for individual customers.

Customers who do not have internal infrastructure ( such as proprietary traders, hedge funds, and greenfield startup trading firms ) avail of this solution.   Energiewerks Ensights Managed provides a quick start solution to get analytics capabilities up and running in a matter of weeks.

Energiewerks clones the reference infrastructure used for its own subscription-based services within weeks of being contracted.   Further existing solutions built using the toolkit by Energiewerks or custom developed for the customer , focused on functional areas such as fundamental and technical analysis for various commodity markets, trade capture, risk management, operations, pricing, portfolio optimization provided by Energiewerks and developed on the Energiewerks Ensights toolkit can be rapidly deployed on a per commodity basis.

This allows customers to obtain quick entry into markets as required where Energiewerks already has coverage with a robust proven solution to meet ever changing business needs at a lowered price point.   Energiewerks is constantly evolving these applications to increase coverage of commodities and functional areas as well as incorporating new technology and inventions into the commodity trading technology stack.

The toolkit approach allows customers to leverage already built modules, extend those modules or roll their own flavors to complement what does not fit their needs.  Architecturally, being a toolkit, deliberate design emphasis is on loose coupling and a high level of cohesiveness steeped in software design principles with a focus on reducing technology complexity and thereby costs.

The cloud-based solution is a turnkey solution where Energiewerks provides the development expertise for custom requirements,  the integration capability with existing investments that the customer has made and round the clock support capability provided out of two locations in the United States and India.

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Energiewerks Ensights Enterprise

Enterprise On-Premise Custom Analytics Infrastructure, Data, Technology and Process

The On-premise platform version is the enterprise-scale analytics platform used to couple Energiewerks supplied analytics with custom analytics and existing enterprise application investments on customer premises.

These are typically large deployments where the customer has made investments in private cloud infrastructure such as VMWare-based or OpenStack-based private or hybrid clouds.

Energiewerks Ensights Enterprise provides a quick start solution to get analytics capabilities up and running in a matter of weeks.

Energiewerks will customize reference infrastructure used for its own subscription-based services within weeks of being contracted.   Further existing solutions built using the toolkit by Energiewerks or custom developed for the customer , focused on functional areas such as fundamental and technical analysis for various commodity markets, trade capture, risk management, operations, pricing, portfolio optimization provided by Energiewerks and developed on the Energiewerks Ensights toolkit can be rapidly deployed on a per commodity basis.  This enables

This enables the Energiewerks customer to obtain ROI of Ensights investments in a matter of weeks rather than long drawn out implementation cycles.   It also allows customers to obtain quick entry into markets as required where Energiewerks already has coverage with a robust proven solution to meet ever changing business needs at a lowered price point.   Energiewerks is constantly evolving these applications to increase coverage of commodities and functional areas as well as incorporating new technology and inventions into the commodity trading technology stack.

The toolkit approach allows customers to leverage already built modules, extend those modules or roll their own flavors to complement what does not fit their needs.  Architecturally, being a toolkit, deliberate design emphasis is on loose coupling and a high level of cohesiveness steeped in software design principles with a focus on reducing technology complexity and thereby costs.

The enterprise solution is a turnkey solution where Energiewerks provides the development expertise for custom requirements,  the integration capability with existing investments that the customer has made and round the clock support capability provided out of two locations in the United States and India if desired.  Most of these deployments are built on a build-operate-transfer ( BOT ) model.   This allows Energiewerks to provide the customer with a quick ROI while customer resources get up to speed with the technology and implementation using Energiewerks training, support and community resources.

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Broad Categorization of Components

The various components of the toolkit can broadly be categorized into the following categories

Data

 Data retrieval from public, proprietary and internal data sources. Blended and stored in SQL / NoSQL data stores.

Infrastructure

 Outsourced, cloud based or on-premise managed infrastructure deployed on AWS / Azure.

Analytics technology

 Proprietary technology using best of breed technology.

Process

 Business processes optimized around data, infrastructure, and technology.

Data tools

Data tools access varying sources of structured and unstructured data. Unstructured sources include websites, images, pictures and free form text. Structured sources include CSV, FTP sites, relational databases, application programming interfaces, multicast sockets and messaging systems. Other tools accumulate data from various disparate sources and blend them together based on defined rules to generate custom data sets for analysis. The  toolkit that provides the extract, transform, and load (ETL) functionality to convert raw and derived data set into cubes for online analytical processing ( OLAP )

Analytics technology tools

Analytics technology tools in the toolkit integrates numerical tools such as python, R and Matlab in to one universal numerical programming library. Energiewerks provides patterns / idioms to integrate existing investment in models developed in tools like Matlab, R and Python in to the larger platform.

Infrastructure tools

The Energiewerks toolkit incorporates an RDBMS based data warehousing component which contains cubes of commonly used datasets.   The scheduler component integrates with Windows task manager, cron, Quartz or Tidal. the scheduler component has API integration with various commercial available schedulers . Big data integration toolkit integrates in to the Hadoop based big data infrastructure. Integration toolkit ties fundamental analytics data in to HDFS, NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, Neo4J and Kafka / Spark

Business process tools

The toolkit provides support for creation of microservices that allow end users to programmatically access data in the data lake from programs written in higher level languages and numerical programming tools.  A web based tool for adhoc queries on cubes based on data within the data lake.   It is a self contained framework for defining cubes that can be made available to end users based on user rights. Users can graphically develop and store MDX queries for querying cubes in the database.

Analytical application development tools

DataTrove is a lightweight Node.js based framework for building user accessed query and data access tools. DataTrove allows end users to parameterize and retrieve data sets into json, csv and xls formats.
Excelnt is a toolkit used within Excel to integrate with the fundamental platforms other components. Excelnt integrates with the various components of the fundamentals platform.
Publishr is a toolkit that consolidates various digital assets such as images, tables, analyses and commentaries into various kinds of reports. These tools generate html, pdf, latex, markdown, streaming and csv outputs as required.
Micro applications toolkit provides for development of micro applications for fundamental analysis. This toolkit provides mechanisms for web and mobile based applications that allow analysts and IT resources to develop small throw away applications with small lead times and does away with the traditional code-test-build- comply-deploy cycle.

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