The CTRM Blog

We’re wrapping up our series of conversations recorded at E-World in Essen Germany with this final episode featuring Frederik Litjens, Murex’s Head of European Commodities.

Frederik provides an update on Murex’s activities in the CTRM space and provides some compelling insights around potential unintended consequences of Dodd Frank and its European equivalents.

A CommodityPoint CommodityAlert

Patrick Reames, Managing Director

Service providers and system integrators are a vital part of the CTRM landscape, providing unique skills or supplementing resources for companies that are working to improve their CTRM system capabilities. In fact, a recent CommodityPoint study, Consultants and Systems Integrators in Trading and Risk Management, notes that about 80% of the companies utilizing commercial CTRM systems have employed the services of one or more of these consulting organizations.

The companies that provide these services around CTRM software can be generally described as one of four types of providers:

We released a new Technical Briefing Note (TBN) this week entitled “CTRM Founded In and Around Business Intelligence”. In this new TBN, we look at the unique design philosophy and architecture underlying Woodland Solutions Phoenix ETRM solution. Having built the product around a data warehouse/data mart core, Woodland’s can offer some unique capabilities in business intelligence and reporting. You can find out more by downloading the report here.

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.