White Papers Addressing Commodity Market Challenges | Page 5

Addressing Commodity Market Challenges With Digitalization Enabled by Platform Technology
physical commodity markets, these established platform
vendors will provide a toolkit with which their clients can
design and build their own custom capabilities.
The ability for customers to use their own resources to
extend the capabilities of the platform as the need arises
does reduce reliance on costly vendor support and is
a key advantage over traditional monolithic software
systems like legacy CTRM/CM products. This ability to
A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
create and quickly integrate new capabilities improves
business and technology agility and helps ensure the
customer’s critical trading systems can support new
business priorities. However, while software platforms
have proven successful in financial trading markets,
their developers’ lack of knowledge of, and inability
to support, common capabilities required by physical
commodity traders and merchants has limited their
success in these markets.
ADDRESSING THE SHORTCOMING OF
TRADITIONAL ETRM/CTRM – EKA’S
APPROACH
Several years ago, Eka recognized the growing limitations of traditional CTRM/CM solutions…
including their own. With rapidly changing global commodity markets and the need for their
customers to digitalize their businesses to in order to remain competitive, the company adopted
a new strategy to create a cloud-based commodity market software platform that could address
the legacy issues of CTRM/CM and become a “hub” of data and information from internal
and external sources (many via pre-built integration apps). When combined with additional
capabilities in advanced analytics, including AI, the platform can then become the enabler of a
digitalized enterprise – automating manual processes, accelerating data and information flow,
and reducing or eliminating the use of spreadsheets.
The result of Eka’s multiyear development effort is
the Eka Commodity Platform – a new solution and
approach that leverages the flexibility and extensibility
of a platform; yet one that addresses the very specific
business process complexities found throughout the
commodity trading and commodity management
markets and along their value chains.
Eka’s platform was designed from inception to run in
the cloud, providing the scalability and accessibility
(including mobile access) required by commodity
trading and management companies. Additionally, and
as opposed to non-industry specific platforms, Eka’s
Commodity Platform delivers common business logic
that is endemic to the diverse commodity markets,
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