Aspect Enterprise Solutions, provider of multi-commodity trading and risk management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications delivered in the Cloud, has strengthened its dominant position in the African market by signing yet more new and repeat business.

Aspect will highlight these wins, and reveal an important new Cloud technology initiative, Cloud24x7, which addresses challenges around availability, security and integration, at the upcoming African Refiners' Association (ARA) Week, in Marrakech, March 19th to 23rd.

Aspect is a long-time sponsor of ARA Week - the region's key annual gathering of oil industry professionals. Users of Aspect's market data and analytics portal, AspectDSC and AspectCTRM now total in the hundreds across across Angola, Republic Of Benin, Congo, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.

Aspect credits its continuing success in Africa down to its deep understanding of the marketplace. "African traders face a number of challenges unique to the continent, among them complex legislation and pricing structures together with the need to monitor exposure and value in real time throughout the trading day," explains Steve Hughes, Aspect CEO.

The flexibility of Aspect's product architecture and its Cloud delivery mechanism means the company can easily customize and localize to accommodate these and other specific needs, then roll out the results for all customers immediately with no significant impact on live trading. Being delivered in the Cloud is an advantage for these companies, because there is no demand for IT resources to maintain it.

"We believe we understand the African market better than any other CTRM vendor and that's why we're seeing the market polarizing around Aspect's technology. It's a massive vote of confidence from what is a key trading community," adds Hughes.

With the new signings Aspect's customer base in Africa includes Chase Petroleum, Conoil, Linetrale, OandO, Ovlas, Sage Energy and Taleveras.

Sage Energy's Emmanuel Egyei-Mensah said going with Aspect's technology had been an easy choice for his firm. "I'd used AspectCTRM at a previous company and it's apparent that Aspect has put real thought into engineering a system that's right for the local market. We also like the way we can go on customize it ourselves to suit the way that we work, rather than having to fit in with someone else's idea of how we should be doing things."

Another supporter of AspectCTRM is Linetrale's Eyimofe Olagbaju. "Aspect's solutions are quick to install and easy to use yet provide an instant picture of trading position, risk, exposure, profit and loss, and real-time market prices. And because everything is delivered in the Cloud we can keep on trading from anywhere, even from our mobiles."

During ARA Week Aspect will demonstrate how its Cloud-based applications enhance customers' business. For one major energy firm Aspect's solutions have unified multiple disparate business applications and processes into just one, saving time and revolutionizing the reporting of real time management information. In another example Aspect will highlight the seamless integration of its CTRM solution with SAP's enterprise resource planning software, daily avoiding hours of data rekeying and eliminating potential errors while preserving the customer's exacting standards for data security.