The CTRM Blog

SolArc have published a bunch of nice photos of their After Hours event last week in London. I am re-posting a few here but if you want to see them all they may be found here. I enjoyed the event very much after delivering my short speech of course. I gave away a copy of our latest book to the person who could provide the right answer to the question ” What anniversary will SolArc be celebrating in 2011?”. The answer, of course, is 20-years!

Consulting my Notes

Lovely Red Eyes I Have

In My Stride

In the run up to starting CommodityPoint’s new CTRM Global Market Sizing study and report, we’ve compiled a listing of every license deal for CTRM applications announced in 2010. Plainly, most deals do not get announced and some vendors never announce anything, so we will be the first to say that the data does not necessarily reflect a truly accurate picture of the events in 2010. Nonetheless, it is interesting to do a little analysis on the data and see what light can be shed on the wider market from that analysis.

CommodityPoint is tracking around 80 CTRM vendors and products, but only about one third of these vendors made any announcements in 2010. We tabulated some 76 license deals across the space globally, and it should be noted that the majority of these were new license deals for a fully-fledged CTRM solution. Of those 76 deals, some 47 (62 percent) were for energy commodities only (either a single commodity such as natural gas, or multiple commodities such as natural gas and power) and 22 deals were for multiple Commodity Groups (i.e., they included energy, agriculturals, and/or metals).

The distribution of the deals is quite interesting. Figure 1 shows a graphical representation of where the licenses were located, though it should also be understood that many deals were actually for implementation in multiple geographical regions. Firstly, the number of license deals announced for Europe was actually higher than for North America and secondly, the number of deals announced in Asia-Pacific was also significant. Whether this data is proportionally representative of the true market is certainly up for discussion, but the trends do fall in line with our previous observations that the European CTRM software markets do appear to be growing faster than their more mature North American counterparts, and the Asia-Pacific region has begun show a more year-to-year consistency in terms of software acquisition and is becoming a more important market for vendors.

Patrick Reames has written a new CommodityPoint White Paper titled “The Ethanol Complex”. You can download it here (Free).

On Tuesday the 15th of March, Germany announced that it was suspending operations at seven of its pre-1980 nuclear plants for three months in the wake of the ongoing nuclear crisis following the earthquake in Japan, while other European Union (EU) countries called for “stress testing” nuclear power facilities across Europe. An emergency meeting convened by the EU energy commissioner discussed the idea asking questions about the ability of European reactors to cope with natural disasters and/or terrorism. Not only has this already had a huge impact on prices in Europe, but it many respects, it represents a potential turn around in policy for Europe.

Brady PLC has released its preliminary financial data for 2010 and last week CommodityPoint took a briefing call from Mr.. Gavin Lavelle, CEO and Mr. Tiny Ratcliffe, Financial Director of the company. The key data shows that Brady PLC increased revenues by 36% to 11.1 million GBP (about $18 million) and saw its operating profit increase by 33% to 1.5 million GBP. Adding the recently acquired VIZ Risk Management in to the numbers, the company would be about a $30 million revenue company in 2010. On this basis, Brady PLC is by far the largest indigenous European vendor of CTRM software and is in a top 4 to 6 spot globally.