The CTRM Blog

It never ceases to amaze me how we continue to uncover CTRM vendors that we were previously unaware of. Yesterday, I had a conversation with Dr. Harri Toivonen, a Partner at a relatively small vendor called Kiodynos based in Finland. Its CTRM product is called Electrum which it claims “enables commodity market participants to effectively handle both their trading and risk management of commodity risk exposures within a single system.” A quick demonstration of the software soon established that this is a functionally-rich and broad footprint solution with an emphasis on risk management. But how? Where did Kiodynos come from and how did it develop a product like Electrum without CommodityPoint hearing of it?

Is now available for download here.

Energeya is a relatively new CTRM vendor that dominates the Italian market and perhaps isn’t that well known outside of Italy or Europe. Yesterday, we took a briefing and demo from Energeya to find out a bit more about the company. Founded in 2008, Energeya LLC is actually a US-based company with its headquarters in Florida. It’s origins are actually as a spin off from Excelergy where the Italian managers of the company, working closely with Enel over several years, had developed the software that is now the XDM suite and they owned the software allowing them to form Energeya. Energeya LLC has a 100% owned subsidiary in Energeya Italia.

Every company that trades commodities is using some type of system capture their trades, manage their positions, and account for the value of the trades. That’s not to say that all the systems being used are created equal —they are most certainly not, after all a paper ledger book can be considered a system. Fortunately, ledger books have gone the way of buggy whips, and now when the term “system” is used, it implies that some form of computer software. “Software”, though, is a pretty broad term and can, and does, mean everything from Excel spreadsheets to a highly sophisticated commercially produced software packages that can cost up to tens of millions of dollars.

CommodityPoint will shortly issue a new free report on Non-Traditional Delivery Methods for CTRM Software and this article provides a snapshot of some of the findings of the study. The study was kindly sponsored by Aspect Enterprise, Allegro Development, IHS, OATI, Navita and SolArc. The full and complete report will be available for download on the UtiliPoint International website and CTRM Blog by the end of July.

Software as a Service, hosting and leasing are all alternative methods for delivery of CTRM software and they seem to be growing in popularity in many segments of the industry. Indeed, our study indicates that these delivery methods are already more widespread than at first we thought and are set to grow rapidly over the coming years.