Kevin McConville's now taking some credit for EnronOnline :-)

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Connelly, Angela  
Sent:	Wednesday, October 31, 2001 7:19 AM
To:	Jafry, Rahil
Subject:	FW: EnronOnline: India: Orbit-e to piggyback on energy trading



 -----Original Message-----
From: 	djcustomclips@djinteractive.com@ENRON  
Sent:	31 October 2001 12:43
To:	182792@mailboy.enron.com
Subject:	EnronOnline: India: Orbit-e to piggyback on energy trading

India: Orbit-e to piggyback on energy trading
N. N. Sachitanand

10/25/2001
The Hindu
Fin. Times Info Ltd-Asia Africa Intel Wire. The Hindu Copyright (C) 2001
Kasturi & Sons Ltd. All Rights Res'd

  A recent report, authored by Mr. Jim Walker of Forrester Research,
estimates that online notional energy trading reached $400 billion in
the year 2000 - a whopping 750 per cent increase in volume over 1999.
Despite the global turbulence in e-business, energy companies jumped on
the Net bandwagon - investing in dot- com trading sites, building
private e-commerce platforms and forming industry consortia. Fighting to
gain online momentum, energy sites have aggressively refined their
offerings - extending into new areas such as financial products (like
natural gas futures and options contracts), non-energy commodities (such
as bandwidth, weather derivatives and metals) and niche services (like
managing information and evaluating trading risk).

  The Forrester report predicts that online energy trading will exceed
$3.6 trillion by 2005. The search for trading liquidity will restructure
the industry along three markets: (1) A central exchange aggregating
high-volume transactions for a limited number of standard products; (2)
Merchant platforms for buying and selling energy to match assets to
customer loads; and (3) solution sites for serving wholesale customers.
  This boom in online energy trading has provided a golden opportunity
for Bangalore-based Orbit-e, a consultancy start-up promoted last year
by Mr. Rahul Chawla, former CEO of the Indian arm of Cambridge
Technology Partners. Orbit-e was initially set up to provide consultancy
and devising solutions for trading in financial securities. Mr. Chawla
believed that the experience of Orbit-e in working with dealers in
financial securities could be leveraged to working with energy
traders.To boost its standing in the energy trading area, Orbit-e has
taken on as a managing partner, Mr. J. Kevin McConville, who was
Managing Director of Enron North America between 1998 and 2000. Enron,
according to the Forrester report, redefined online energy trading in
2000, accounting for $336 million of the total $400 million value
traded. By the end of the year, Enron's marketmakers conducted 74 per
cent of their trades through EnronOnline, rather than closing deals over
the phone.

  Orbit-e, which has now around 90 persons on board, secured its first
round of venture funding from Warburg Pincus in October last year.
Pointing out that the financing came at a time when venture funds were
fighting shy of the IT industry, Mr. Chawla claimed that this was an
indication of the sound prospects for the company due to the niche areas
it had selected.

  At a time when toplines in this industry are contracting, Orbit-e
expects to cross a turnover of Rs. 20 crores in the current year, up
from Rs. 8 crores last year.



Folder Name: EnronOnline
Relevance Score on Scale of 100: 81

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