The CTRM Blog

I had the opportunity to visit with Meetesh Shah, one of the executive leaders of iRely, and his team yesterday.  iRely has been a somewhat quiet company since their founding several years ago, having been primarily focused on developing a solid base of technical capabilities in commodity trading and logistics, primarily in the petroleum distribution, agriculture and softs markets.

Despite the relatively low profile, the company, headquartered in Fort Wayne Indiana, has built an impressive roster of clients and has added additional capabilities to their product family through both internal development and acquisition.  In fact, in 2011 iRely acquired Comtech, a Houston based ERP and financial systems company.  The acquisition provided not only additional technology and product capabilities, but also expanded iRely’s global footprint with a support center in the Philippines.

In the last few days, we’ve seen a few new deal announcements in CTRM with two new agriculture related deals and one in the crude trading space.

On the ag side, we saw a press release from EKA touting their recent win with “GrainCorp Limited, one of Australia’s largest stock exchange listed agribusinesses…”  According to the release, the company will use the system in their newly established European trading and marketing operation for managing trading, execution, risk, settlement and reporting.  All in all, a nice win for EKA.

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.

I don’t usually post news about vendor awards and quadrangle placings as I believe them to be self serving nonsense in the most part lacking in any real substance. However, this one did catch my eye as being noteworthy. JustCommodity, an Asian vendor of agricultural CTRM software primarily has announced that it had achieved a Compound Annual Growth Rate (“CAGR”) of 131.63% over a three year period and has grown its headcount and operations from a small 2 man team in Singapore to over 60 employees across Asia.