The CTRM Blog

Around three years ago, I met with Wolfgang Ferse of IRM at E-World in Essen to discuss OLF’s acquisition of IRM. I was keen and interested to understand the integration strategy and how the two companies would work together (see that IssueAlert in our archives here). I also remarked that the acid test, according to Dr. Ferse, was both the “cultural fit and the degree of happiness with IRM’s key staff with the arrangement and the successful integration of the two product suites.”

For Immediate Release

Houston, TX USA and Brno, Czech Republic—April 29, 2010—CommodityPoint, A Division of UtiliPoint International Inc. focused on commodity markets and technologies, has significantly expanded its industry commentary and thought leadership vehicles in 2010 through the addition of the CTRM Blog (www.ctrmblog.com) and the new weekly CommodityAlert newsletter.

Sitting in Europe after a prolonged spell in North America, I am often struck by the often vast cultural differences between societies on the two sides of “the pond.” There are many examples in day-to-day life ranging from dress styles, attitudes towards alcohol, to just people’s general outlook.

Culture and Business

CommodityPoint now has a community on LinkedIn to add to our Facebook Group, Twitter account etc. It’s the age of social networking and LinkedIn is amongst the most powerful and popular sites. If you have a LinkedIn account – join our community by searching for CommodityPoint…. keep up with what we are doing and join in discussions around CTRM software, commodity trading, risk management and much more.

Just recently there has been a bunch of vendor announcements regarding being ranked by a particular magazine in the space and/or an IT analyst firm. CommodityPoint has looked at ranking CTRM vendors on an annual basis and always come to the conclusion that it is not possible to fairly rank vendors and products in the CTRM software space. The reason for this is that it is simply not a homogenous software category. It is our view that any attempt at ranking CTRM software products is at best misleading as on what basis are you ranking them? By commodity coverage? by technology?, functionality?, market coverage? etc.