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E-World 2026 Recap

· 3 min read
Colin Hartley
Colin Hartley
ODSL Creator

E-World 2026: My Takeaway

The team visited the E-World conference in Essen, Germany - here is what we learned

The conversation nobody's having out loud​

Another E-World wrapped. And once again, the real insights weren't on stage—they were in the candid conversations happening between sessions.

People are tired of waiting​

  • Waiting for feature requests.
  • Waiting for professional services engagements.
  • Waiting for the vendor to prioritise their needs over the next client’s.

I’ve heard this story dozens of times this week, and I’ve heard it from both sides — because before starting OpenDataDSL, I worked at major peer companies in the commodity data space. I’ve seen how it works from the inside. A client needs something the product doesn’t do. Maybe it becomes a chargeable feature request that takes months. Maybe it gets scoped as a professional services project billed on time and materials. Either way, the client is dependent on the vendor. Every time.

That’s the fundamental difference I’d want anyone to take away from our conversations this week: the difference between a product and a platform.

Product vs Platform

A product can only be extended by the company that built it. A platform gives you the tools to extend it yourself.

At OpenDataDSL, we’ve built exactly that. Our clients don’t submit feature requests and wait — they build.

One client needed trade reconciliation functionality. Today, that exists as an app that extends our platform. We worked with them to get it started, but they own it. They’re the ones adding new trading sources, writing new matching rules across counterparties and their internal ETRM systems. No tickets. No billable hours. No dependency on us.

This isn’t theoretical. Our clients are already creating their own workflows and data exports using ODSL, our purpose-built data management language. It’s a published API — we can write it, or they can. That choice sits with them, not with us.

And then there’s the question I got asked most this week:

What about data coverage?​

We’re newer than our peers, so yes, our catalogue is still growing. But here’s where it gets interesting.

We’ve built AI agents that allow anyone — our team or our clients — to add new data sources through a simple prompt. The AI then handles scheduling, adapts collection over time, and builds quality control by observing the data as it flows in. So rather than waiting for a vendor to add a source to their catalogue, you describe what you need and the platform figures out how to get it, schedule it, and validate it. The data gap doesn’t stay a gap for long.

This is what I think the energy data space is waking up to. The era of monolithic, vendor-controlled products served us well for a long time. But the pace of change in energy markets — new instruments, new regulations, new counterparties, new data — demands something more adaptable.

It demands a platform. And it was good to see so many people at E-World starting to think that way too.

Great meeting so many of you this week. If any of this resonated, let's continue the conversation.