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.

Brady Plc is the only publicly held CTRM vendor in the space.  Being public, and therefore being required to report their financial results, the company provides some unique insights into the health of the CTRM market, especially in their core market area of Europe.

According to their press release of January 16th, the company saw a 70% year-over-year growth in revenues in 2011, including increases in recurring revenue (revenues from support & maintenance, license “rentals”, etc)  of 145%, which represents about 52% of their total 2011 revenues.  Recurring revenues in 2010 were only 36% of total revenues.  They noted that they had secured 14 “substantial” new license sales in 2011, versus 10 in 2010.

CommodityPoint‘s CTRM Vendor Perception Survey is nearing its completion and you have but days left to express your thoughts about who’s the leader in CTRM (amongst other thoughts), as we conduct this latest version of our biennial review of the market’s perceptions of trading and risk management applications and their vendors.

So, we would really appreciate hearing your opinions 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.

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.