The CTRM Blog

Allegro Development seem to have been on a roll recently making several announcements regarding new licensing deals for its ETRM software. The latest was announced to day and is right here in Europe. Industrielle Werke Basel (IWB), an independent Swiss utility company owned by the city of Basel, has selected the Allegro 8 platform to manage its power trading activities.

IWB is currently reshaping its power trading operations in response to the ongoing liberalization of the Swiss electricity markets and required a flexible platform to optimize trade capture, scheduling, market and credit risk management and settlement operations.

Last week I visited with Brady PLC in central London for a briefing from CEO Gavin Lavelle and his team. Brady is a sizable company these days with over 150 employees including six in North America and one in Singapore. It also has more than 150 customers now located around the world. As a public company, Brady is happy to report some financial statistics too including 10 Million GBP in cash on the balance sheet and no debts and a market cap of about 40 million GBP. It’s institutional investors include the likes of Fidelity, BlackRock, Gartmore, Legal & General and Jupiter. Brady had a good 2010 as already reported elsewhere on this blog with revenues and profits up 36% and 33% respectively.

Navita is building up its team of German speaking staff in its ongoing efforts to break into the German ETRM and related software market. Anyone who ever attended E-World in Essen will understand that the German market is pretty opaque and insular served primarily by German vendors. Non the less it is a large market that might benefit from more choice. Part of the problem is that it seems to require German speaking resources and a presence in the country to break in. Navita have both having recently opened an office in Germany and having hired three German staff already. It also has four German clients for its software and hence has a beach head to build on.

I often get asked what I do for a living. Quite frankly, that is a hard question to answer. I am an analyst, I say, covering global commodity markets technologies and business issues. The usual blank look returned to this statement tells me that I may as well have said I was an astrophysicist! In fact, I have been an analyst in this space for almost 15-years now and I still have a difficult time explaining to those outside of the industry exactly what I do. But let me give it a try none the less.

OpenLink’s IRM announced yesterday it’s first deal and implementation in Russia. The announcement can be found here. OLF has been actively engaged in trying to sell into Russian power markets as they deregulate for some time along with European vendor Navita, who a couple of years ago tied up a deal with a Russian SI to help them enter the market. OLF says;