Message From Our CEO

As we head into the fourth quarter home stretch of 2017, I am already seeing companies gearing up to either respond to the market changes we have experienced this year, or plan how to get ahead of the pack.

Some of the more notable trends we are seeing in various sectors, as evidenced by some of the projects we are working on, include:

• Energy retailers are on a M&A rampage as the US market matures and acquisitions seem to be a popular growth model. The more progressive retailers are expanding internationally, either to Japan or to one or more of the EU markets.
• A large number of gas pipeline projects are in the queue at FERC, many of which are being contested by either locals or environmental groups. The smarter groups contesting these pipelines have finally figured out that rather than march and protest, do the economic benefits homework and argue using real data.
• The US has always been a popular market for international energy and technology players to enter and/or invest in. This year we are experiencing a heat wave of international companies either launching new business units or buying existing companies across a variety of segments.  Some of these segments include: gas fired generation, utility scale storage, renewables, retail and/or wholesale marketing, microgrids, and data management solutions.
• The microtrend of five years ago with distributed generation and customer energy management solutions has morphed into one of the hottest growth markets in the energy space. The number of new entrants seems to grow daily and among the large legacy players trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the list includes pretty much all of them.
• The impact of the item above on distribution utilities has been talked about for several years. Now that the adoption numbers are growing rapidly, we are seeing many utilities go back to the drawing board as their earlier assumptions and analysis are proving to be vastly different from today’s realities.

While the energy sector may never match the pace of change we see in the telecom business, over the past five years we have seen things changing must faster than ever before throughout our industry.