The CTRM Blog

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:

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.

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.