The CTRM Blog

Last week I attended Solarc’s Ascent conference which was held at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines Resort near Austin. As they have done in past years, Solarc put on a terrific, well produced event, with several hundred folks in attendance, including customers, Solarc personnel, and technology partners.

Solarc’s president and founder, Brad Anderson, highlighted many of the new customers the company has signed in the last year, including Marathon, Con Agra, Vattenfall, QEP, True Oil (aka 88 Oil), Kolmar, Kuwait Petroleum, and others. The company has seen good sales activity in all their covered commodities and across most geographic regions. In fact, Mr. Anderson pointed out that half of the company’s business is now comprised of companies that operate outside the North America, or have significant operations in both EMEA and North America.

As reported by CNBC last week, CareerBliss, a job posting/career resources website conducted a survey of hundreds of thousands of employees in 2011 and determined the 10 “most hated jobs” in the US. As noted in the CNBC article, “In almost all cases, respondents reported that the factors causing the most job dissatisfaction were not lousy pay or a desk near the bathroom. CareerBliss found that limited growth opportunities and lack of reward drove the misery index up more than anything else.”

Last week I made the 200 odd km trip up the D1 motorway to Prague to attend Brady PLC’s Customer Advisory Board. The two-day event was held at the Marriott in the center of Prague and was attended by about 100 people from a wide variety of Brady’s clients.

Opening the event, CEO, Gavin Lavelle, outlined the history of the company and provided an overview of the products, clients, and financial data for the company. He then discussed some current business drivers and issues facing clients and the industry at large briefly demonstrating new Brady solutions or responses to each of these.

Open Link Financial (OLF) announced last week that The Carlyle Group has agreed to sell the company to Hellman & Friedman, a San Francisco based private equity firm.  Here’s the text of the announcement -

Open Link Financial, Inc (OpenLink) today announced that The Carlyle Group has agreed to sell OpenLink, a software provider for participants in the global commodity, energy, agribusiness, commercial/industrial and financial markets, to affiliates of Hellman & Friedman. The transaction is subject to traditional closing conditions and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2011.

CommodityPoint is seeking to add an analyst covering Europe & Asia-Pacific. The successful candidate can be located anywhere in Europe and amongst other skills and experience, should have the following;

Candidate should possess a bachelor’s degree, preferably in Business, Marketing, or MIS/IT, and have at least 2 years of work experience either with a wholesale commodity/energy trading company or a provider of software solutions or services to that market.