White Papers Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM | Page 3

Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM?

A ComTech Advisory Whitepaper

IS NOW THE TIME FOR OPEN
SOURCE CTRM?
Here we are in 2014, almost 20-years after the ETRM and later, the CTRM, software categories were ‘invented’ and
in some ways, very little has actually changed. Yes, there has been some vendor consolidation, but for every vendor
and solution that has been acquired or gone out of business, at least one new supplier has consequently emerged.
We seem to have been writing that ‘there are over 70 vendors of E/CTRM software’ for the last 10-years at least
and it’s true – there really are that many in the CTRMCenter software directory. In fact, we have found and added
3-4 new ones this year alone!

It’s also true that as the software category has
grown – and we estimate it’s a $1.6bn industry
this year – some vendors have thrived and now
have triple or double digit million dollar revenues.
Vendors such as OLF, Triple Point (acquired itself by ION last year), Allegro, SunGard Energy,
Brady and EKA are all reasonably sizable companies but there remains a whole raft of smaller
niche vendors happily serving specific needs, geographies, or commodities, both small and large,
across the breadth of the market.
New or old, every one of these vendors initially set
out to do something unique. Each markets themselves as being somehow different and better than
those that have gone before – cheaper, faster, more
sophisticated, more reliable, faster to implement…
and the list goes on. In fact, by building on the latest
available technologies, they may indeed be an advancement of the state of the art in CTRM technology. However, at their core, each and every new product that comes to the market starts by defining and
modeling the same basic components of commodity

© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2014

trading. For example, to simply capture a deal in a CTRM system, the
following information (and more) must be defined in the code and input
by the user:
//commodity
//counterparty
//contract
//deal
//term
//deal type
//price
//volume
//location
//facility, such as a pipe, wire, truck, train, vessel; each with a number
of other attributes that have to be defined and coded…

Every new system that is brought to market starts out with a database
that is that actually the vendor’s interpretation of very common attributes and “sub-attributes” such as names, phones numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, currencies, and the list go on. So why are
vendors constantly “recreating the wheel” of commodity trading every
time a new product is launched?