The CTRM Blog

Yesterday, CommodityPoint’s parent company purchased the assets of the Energy hedge Fund Center (announcement here. The EHFC is a highly visited web community that provides information and resources for those interested in Energy and Commodity Hedge Funds and other private investment vehicles. It has an Alexa Rank of 112,000 in the USA and Google Page Rank of 5 to reflect the activity on the site.

Over the last two years or so, the EHFC site has been somewhat neglected and so CommodityPoint will be bringing it up to date and creating some new offerings and services from the site over the next month or so. None the less, I’m excited to have the asset which provides us access to the hedge fund community.

The E/CTRM Conference in Prague on May 23rd was well-attended and had great feedback on its value as an event in the energy/commodity trading and risk management space. For us at CommodityPoint, the positive feedback was gratifying, as it was our first- ever attempt at pulling off a conference.

The conference kicked off with a keynote by Mr. Rob Pringle, Head of Global IT for Gazprom Marketing & Trading on the topic, “CTRM for a Global Trading Business: Does Utopia Exist?”
Mr. Pringle started out by introducing the Gazprom operation before defining his terms including the meaning of “Utopia.” He posed many of the common questions regarding CTRM solutions (Buy versus build? One or many? How to deliver and operate? and so on), drawing on his own expertise and upon on his company’s experiences to qualify and explain his observations and answers. One of his key points was that solutions are about technology, process and people and that CTRM software was just the technology. Another key point was that many view “Go Live” or Day One of a CTRM software implementation project as their ultimate goal whereas in reality, that was just the beginning. The challenge was how to stop the CTRM software from becoming legacy.

Dallas-based Allegro Development today announced that Saudi Aramco has chosen the Allegro 8 platform to support its newly launched worldwide refined products trading subsidiary (Aramco Trading). Aramco Trading requires enterprise software to manage its refined products trading, logistics, reporting, and compliance functions.

“We are privileged to work with Saudi Aramco to support their expanding refined products business,” stated Eldon Klaassen, Allegro CEO. “Their selection of the Allegro platform further demonstrates our ability to develop and deploy trading and risk management solutions that meet the needs of the global energy market, including many of the world’s largest and most successful organizations.”

Note: I don’t usually post articles by third parties especially vendors but I rather like this on about our conference in Prague by David Calmonson of Contigo.

I have to admit that I am a cynic when it comes to spending time at events such as conferences and exhibitions. The travel time (another ash cloud was looming– I think I am jinxed), missing my football team returning home with their first major trophy in a generation and thinking about all the ‘real work’ I needed to be doing, did not put me in a very receptive frame of mind at the outset!