I had the opportunity to present and lead a roundtable discussion at the Allegro Summit 2007 in Dallas last week. It was a very well organized and hosted event and I extend my congratulations and thanks to the staff at Allegro that pulled it together.

Allegro used the event to roll-out the latest version of their system, Allegro 8. It was the first time I had seen it and I was pretty impressed. Amongst many new usability features, they’ve provided new facilities for users to select screen defaults, improving usability and productivity. But I think the two most important features they rolled out were the use of Grid Computing and preliminary look at what could be a real game changer - imbedding ICE exchange functionality into their product.

On the Grid Computing front, they have created a technical architecture that allows users to distribute the computation load across a wide network of computers, decreasing calculation time and increasing system responsiveness. It promises to be a significant improvement over older systems that relied on a single server and a user’s desktop machine.

They also gave a preview of the tools they’ve developed to embed ICE functionality - posting, viewing, or executing bids and offers directly within the Allegro system. They stressed that they are still in negotiations with ICE as to whether they can contractually roll the functionality out to the users, but if successful, this could be a real game changer for the company. With the functionality they displayed, users can review and evaluate, within their position screens in the Allegro product, bids and offers that appear on ICE. If they see a deal that fits their need, they can execute right from the system, without switching over to ICE and risk loosing the deal because of time constraints.

To me, this type of functionality is representative of the true potential of the latest technologies. My presentation at the Summit (which was not coordinated with them beforehand) included a discussion of what the next generation of ETRM systems should look like. One of the points I raised was that we haven’t seen systems leveraging the power of many of the technologies that have been deployed in the consumer oriented markets, particularly applications that leverage other apps on the web, something that is commonly being called “mash-ups”. Well, Allegro certainly seems to be on what I would consider to be the right path toward a next generation product, displaying innovation and creativity in moving their product forward. I hope that ICE and Allegro can reach the appropriate agreements that allows Allegro bring this functionality to the market.