Danske Commodities (Danish Commodities) is one of Denmark’s fastest-growing companies. The company specializes in electricity and gas trade. Trading is based on monitoring the European markets around the clock while receiving and analyzing huge amounts of data every day about the conditions affecting the markets. It puts high demands on the company’s data processing and storage, but thanks to new artificial intelligence (AI) driven solutions, it is possible to receive and analyse data faster than ever before.
Few people may have heard of the Aarhus-based company, which moves electricity and gas resources around the European markets. However, Danske Commodities is one of the Danish companies with the largest turnover. Last year's finance report showed a profit of just over 77 million Euro. Thanks to the implementation of a new data management solution, the company is also setting a new standard for how artificial intelligence can be deployed for in an increasingly database-driven business environment.
“We are hugely data-driven. Everything moves very fast, and we make many trades during a day. Therefore, our IT infrastructure must ensure that we have up-to-date data available because it is a crucial foundation for making the right decisions. It can cost us a lot of money if data is outdated and we make decisions on the wrong basis,” Lars Vedelø, Head of Operations and Services at Danske Commodities, explains.
The typical workstation at Danske Commodities consists of 15 screens. From here, an employee can monitor a plethora of relevant data. For example, you need to know the weather forecast for the countries trading green energy, and meteorologists are employed solely to analyze the incoming weather data.
Danske Commodities has about 300 employees, working in three-team shifts, covering 24 hours a day when the markets need to be monitored. The company is dependent on a finely tuned storage solution, which has the capacity to handle the trades of a given day while simultaneously rapidly processing incoming data. That was exactly what Lars and his team were looking for when they started a collaboration with Danoffice IT. “We knew that our existing storage solution had limitations, and it is critical for us that our data resource is constantly running. We lacked both the capacity to receive the daily data and to process it quickly enough,” Lars Vedelø explains. His IT department consists of just 20 people who work with infrastructure, support, security and facilities. There is no time for maintenance, and due to the heavy dependency on up-to-date data, downtime is not an option.
