
Notably, Unicorn is not new in the ETRM business. Its market management system (MMS), Damas, is already renowned in the energy market and used by companies in more than half of the European countries. Today, Unicorn’s winning advantage is its state-of-the-art technology, and its latest releases bear a testament to that technological prowess. In addition, the company’s Lancelot ETRM product family has catered to the needs of wholesale and retail trading for years. The biggest strength for Unicorn lies in the fact that in spite of being a 20-year-old company, it is always walking neck and neck with the latest industry trends. Evidence of this is Unicorn’s newly-developed platform, Libra, which enables European-wide crossborder sharing of balancing energy. Alongside, in an effort to upgrade the Lancelot ETRM solution, “We have introduced the top technology and architecture (mobilefirst, cloud-ready, IoT-ready) and made the platform ready for the upcoming business trends like smart grids, decentralisation,” informs Konrád.
Today, Lancelot ETRM also functions as a comprehensive energy data management platform. Its repository of large volumes of data that are fed both automatically and manually into the system ensures that users get a comprehensive and transparent workflow. The platform also offers end-user customisation, facilitating clients to configure their data entities, calculations, views, and reports. Apart from being relevant in today’s time, Lancelot ETRM is also versatile in its implementation approach.
Unicorn is capable of implementing Lancelot ETRM on-premise and also providing it ‘as a service’—through Plus4U Internet service—to meet the needs of the small- and mediumsized enterprises.
Today, Unicorn’s winning advantage is its state-of-theart technology, and its latest releases bear a testament to that technological prowess
Displaying such robustness, Unicorn’s Lancelot ETRM platform has already carved a niche for itself in the ETRM market and has created several benchmarks in various enterprises like Innogy, EnBW group, E.ON, NET4GAS, and many other similar companies. For some of these companies, the sole motive behind choosing Unicorn’s Lancelot platform is its ability to predict how meteorological changes affecting electricity and gas generation and consumption. Especially for the companies engaging in short-term trading, their profits are directly dependent on the quality of predictions. Naturally, Unicorn prioritises designing its platform with superior forecasting algorithms that are capable of predicting load as well as production metrics in real-time.
Having already found its mass acceptance within the borders of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, now, Unicorn wants to implement its solution globally. In fact, in 2020, sales campaigns are awaiting to be launched in several European countries, while Unicorn also plans on upgrading all its existing customers to the latest Lancelot ETRM version. However, as mentions Konrád, Lancelot ETRM is not a universal, all-encompassing commodity trading platform. Therefore, even though Unicorn would keep supporting other related commodities such as oil, coal, or greenhouse gas allowances, it would focus mainly on areas of electricity and gas where Lancelot ETRM has the best prerequisites to succeed.