This month marked the 10^th anniversary of World Energy’s first energy procurement auction. It’s been quite a run since that first event.

Our first client, the Federal Government’s General Services Administration (GSA), is still with us, and recently renewed our contract for 5 years with an option to renew for 5 more after that. Members of their team have won a dozen or so awards for our innovative collaboration, and we have transacted about $1 billion in energy on their behalf.

For our part, we have risen to be the leader in on-line energy auctions with well over 50% market share. Not bad for a company started in the basement of the old police station in Worcester, MA, particularly when over 40 companies, many with tens of millions of dollars in venture backing, saw the same opportunity we did – the convergence of electricity deregulation and B2B eCommerce.

By understanding that deregulation was a necessary but not sufficient cause for competitive switching and realizing that energy managers weren’t going to log into a web site and buy a million dollars’ worth of power without support, we were able to take a technology-enabled approach to the electricity brokerage market that married state of the art auction technology with energy experts.

Fast forward 10 years and we are the only publicly traded player in the space, have the largest supplier and channel partner networks in the industry, and have a customer base that is unparalleled. The “secret sauce” in our success is our auction platform and the process that supports it.

I’ll say it: Our auctions get the absolute best price available in the market at the time. There are several reasons for this and I will outline them in a separate blog post.

While great pricing is the whole point of effective procurement, the auction brings unparalleled transparency and documentation to support government procurement mandates, PUC approval, Sarbanes Oxley compliance and plain old CYA, so you can prove to your boss you used a detailed, thorough and documented process. A less heralded benefit is a level of excitement to the process. Watching an auction sure beats reading and evaluating paper or email RFP responses.

Thank you to everyone who has supported our journey, and here’s to the next 10 years!