The CTRM Blog

We’re launching the premiere of our “Conversations with Leaders in CTRM Technology” series today, visiting with our first guest, Trip Ray, SunGard Energy and Commodities‘ senior vice president and managing director for the Americas.  In this first episode of the series, presented in two parts, Trip discusses recent developments at SunGard Energy and Commodities and looks forward to what the future may hold for the commodity trading industry and the technologies that serve it.

Note: Please excuse the somewhat variable audio as we are still ironing some technical bugs in our production process.

Part 1

Part 2

It’s no secret that instant message (IM) systems have become one of the three primary communication channels for energy traders, along side the phone and online exchanges such as ICE.  Despite it’s popularity in energy trading, up until now it has been much like the phone – while the conversation could be recorded, its unstructured nature has made it difficult and impractical to try to programatically capture the conversation and reduce its relevant elements down to a set of data that could be automatically passed to a trading system, such as an ETRM or CTRM application.  The issue has been around understanding the semantics of the deal – what do the words on the screen, typos and all, mean?  As humans, we’re pretty adept at translating slang, shorthand, or mistyped words into meaningful concepts …software and computers, not so much.

I recently spent some time with Kevin Gerold, who heads up Paragon Consulting, in order to get an update on the company’s activities.  As readers may know, Paragon’s credit risk solution, Vanguard,  was launched in early 2009 and found early and solid success in the ETRM markets; and according to Kevin, is continuing to land significant new customers.

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.

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.