Houston-based Coral Energy launched coralconnect.com, ane-business Web site featuring e-commerce transactions, customizedcommodity price information, proprietary energy market analysis andother customer services.

Coral brought the site on line Wednesday, creating an e-commerceplatform for customers to price their North American gas purchasesand sales. Coral expects to expand the site’s e-commerce featuresto encompass additional energy commodities and transactioncapabilities. Coral currently is registering members at the site.

During the past seven months, industrial and regulated energyconsumers have worked directly with Coral to develop the design andfunctionality of coralconnect.com. The customer input wassupplemented by a Cisco Systems advisory team that assisted indevelopment of Coral’s e-business strategy and supporting Internetinfrastructure.

“E-business is all about customer service, so we asked ourcustomers what the site should offer,” said Charlie Crisp, CoralCEO. “Our customer-centric approach has been very well received.Energy buyers have become an integral part of our developmentteam.”

The coralconnect.com site features a variety and depth of NorthAmerican energy market information. These free services areexpanded and enhanced for Coral customers, who can apply to conducttransactions, access account information and receive otherpersonalized services as the site expands.

“Initially, we’re going to be focusing on financial products,but we would hope to expand that into physical in the near future,”said Jim Whalen, Coral chief commercial officer. “When I sayfinancial and physical, I’m just referring to natural gas. We don’thave any time that we would anticipate doing financial or physicalpower transactions on the site. That doesn’t mean we won’t be doingthem.”

The Coral site differs from one recently announced by Enron thatwill provide real-time prices for the commodities Enron tradesaround the globe (see Daily GPI Oct. 27). The Coral site will notprovide real-time prices, at least not initially, and pricing onCoral’s site will be limited to North America. Eventually, theCoral site could open up to other gas sellers, Whalen said.

Coral developed coralconnect.com with the objectives ofincreasing the quality of customer service and enhancing businessdevelopment.

“Coral strongly values customer relationships, and e-businessmodels such as coralconnect.com enhance that interaction,” saidCrisp. “Routine transactions and data exchanges can be automated,freeing time to work on the customer’s more important issues and tojointly evaluate business opportunities.”

Members accessing coralconnect.com can customize the contentdisplays for the information most relevant to them. Contentinitially featured includes energy prices (NYMEX and otherexchanges and OTC indicative prices), energy news, weather updates,decision support tools, and other features. On-line orders forpricing natural gas are available following application approval.

Coral plans enhancements to the site to provide registeredcustomers personalized reports and instantaneous alerts based oncustomer-set market or account criteria.

Coral’s work in the development of coralconnect.com wassupported by a high-level development team from Cisco Systems. Asan e-commerce pioneer, Cisco advised on site design, systemarchitecture and customer input dynamics. State-of-the-artinformation technology systems and software have been utilized toensure reliability and security.

Coral Energy, an affiliate of Shell Oil Company, is a majorNorth American energy marketing, financial services and energymanagement company. It is among the five largest wholesale gasmarketers in North America.

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