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.

CommodityPoint has launched a new research project, the 2011 CTRM Vendor Perception Survey. In this latest version of our biennial review of the market’s perceptions of trading and risk management applications and their vendors, we’re expanding our coverage beyond energy and are looking at all commodity trading applications.

So, we would really appreciate hearing your thoughts about, and experiences with, the various products and vendors that support energy and commodity trading activities around the globe.  The short electronic survey won’t take you long to complete and the final report will be freely available for you to check how your views match up with others.

I was in Calgary this week visiting with the folks at SAS RiskAdvisory and speaking at an event that they produced for their clients.  I continue to be impressed with the vision the RiskAdvisory group has in the area of utilizing SAS’s latest data and information aggregation solutions to enable sophisticated energy risk analytics across the entirety of a energy centric enterprise.  Their approach, which they call Energy Commodity Risk Aggregation and Analytics (ECRAA) has taken advantage of SAS’s industry leadership in the areas of data integration and enterprise risk, and have combined that with their expertise and experience in energy risk modeling.  The result is a solution that has seen very good success and acceptance, including the signing of one of Canada’s largest oil and gas producers in just the last couple of weeks.

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.

A new Industry Views paper is available both on this site and also on utilipoint.com (white papers). The paper features contributions by four vendors on the topic of next generation CTRM software.