The CTRM Blog

I recently caught up with Milista Anderson, SVP with SunGard Energy and Commodities.  She brought me up to speed with some of their recent activity, including a number of new client signings and their continuing efforts to move their existing clients ahead onto the Aligne platform.

In terms of new sales in the last couple of months, their most notable wins, among several, have been for their Aligne Pipeline Operations product for a North American based gas distribution company and Aligne for Trading and Risk Management, including a significant deal with a large European power utility.

In this ever-evolving world of acronyms, abbreviations and contractions, it really does seem quite possible that one could easily get confused as to the actual meaning and/or message of a product or service.

No truer thing has been said of the CommodityPoint SourceBook series, our very successful series of guides for companies that are seeking to acquire CTRM software, services, or ancillary products, and for which we continue to be peppered with queries as to how valid a specific publication is to the particular vendor or consultant in question and/or which one they should be listed in.

If there is a single issue today that is bound to cause controversy and a reaction from our readers it has to be that of global warming. My past efforts at discussing this issue have always resulted in a lot of feedback from all sides of the debate. However, I want to tackle this topic again today as it impacts our industry significantly.

Triple Point announced today that they had acquired Australian mining software producer QMASTOR.  As we had discussed previously in the blog, Triple Point has been pursuing shares of the publicly traded QMASTOR for several months.

It certainly looks like a pretty good deal for Triple Point.  For a price of around $25 million (assuming close to 100% of QMASTOR’s stock was purchased), the company will add somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million in revenues in FY2011 and significantly expand Triple Point’s presence in the Australian market, which accounts for 82% of QMASTOR’s revenues.  On the product side, QMASTOR’s solutions appear to fit well with Triple Point’s growing focus on total value chain management, that is tracking commodities (and transactions) from production to consumption.

An UtiliPoint IssueAlert
Patrick Reames, Managing Director, CommodityPoint

The announcement last week that OpenLink Financial (OLF), one of the world’s largest CTRM solutions providers, had entered into an agreement to acquire their sometime rival (depending on the industry segment) SolArc has created quite a stir in the market. Though we’ve seen a couple of CTRM vendors change hands at the investor level in the last couple of months, including Hellman and Friedman buying into OLF, this new announcement reflects the largest acquisition of one vendor by another in this space for many years, and is a combining of two of the top five CTRM solution providers.