The CTRM Blog

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.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas reminds me that we have a long way to go as an industry in terms of innovating the technologies used in CTRM.  While exciting new products and services are unveiled this week at the annual electronics industry get together in Sin City, the energy and commodity trading industry continues to plod down the same weather beaten paths in CTRM technology.  We still use terms like “n-tier” and “straight-thru-processing” as if these are the hottest new technologies to appear in the last year; meanwhile, the consumer markets are continually introduced to innovative new products, services and media that are transformative – changing the way people collect, share and consume information and, arguably even changing the very nature of human interaction.

A UtiliPoint IssueAlert and CommodityPoint CommodityAlert
By Patrick Reames, Managing Director

The University of Houston’s Bauer School of Business launched their ETRM Systems course in the spring of 2010 with 18 students. Since that time, the program, founded and still lead by industry veteran Ed Bell, has grown steadily and has attracted considerable attention both on and off campus. According to Mr. Bell, “We’ve been pleased and gratified with the success of the program. We’ve seen significant and consistent growth in enrollment each semester, growing from 18 students in our inaugural semester, to 50 the next, then 70, and now more than 100 in this just concluded class.” He further noted that the spring 2012 semester currently stands at 10 MBAs and 121 undergrads, with a couple of weeks left for enrollment.

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.

Despite my somewhat optimistic early review in this blog, the Kindle Fire has, to me, become that once promising relationship that has turned sour and ugly.  Though I’ve tried to tell myself otherwise, the reality is that it was never all that promising to begin with.  But, like a relationship in which you’ve invested a bit of time and emotion initiating (as you might pursue an attractive girl), in your heart you want to believe it will turn out better than your brain tells you its going to, even after a first date filled with inane chit-chat in which your new companion’s only response to your side of the conversation is “huh?”.  Yep, that’s the Kindle Fire to me, the semi-attractive girl that just isn’t very smart and doesn’t possess the intuition to understand what it is you’re looking for.