White Papers Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM | Page 4

Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM? A ComTech Advisory Whitepaper NO COMMON LEXICON Part of the reason is that while you can find dictionary definitions for each of these attributes, there is no common lexicon across the commodity trading industries. For example, a deal can mean buying or selling, to a counterparty, a specific volume of a specific commodity on a specific day, and at a specific point; or it could mean a buying or selling to a counterparty, a specific commodity at multiple locations, each with a different price across multiple days, weeks or years. This difference, while not appearing on the surface to be consequential, actually has fundamental implications on the way the deal is priced, tracked, valued and settled within a software system. Anyone that has tried to integrate two different systems from different vendors, or has tried to move data from a system from Vendor “A” that is being replaced to a new system from Vendor “B” will have encountered the impact of these different views; and if a system was actually found to move transactional data across, it will almost certainly have required hundreds or thousands of hours of human intervention to reconcile the differences between the two systems. This is why it is exceedingly rare for any software customer to move historical transactions from one vendor’s system into another. Given this lack of a common lexicon for commodity trading systems, every system in use today reflects the definitions that their developers understood based upon their specific experiences; or that they otherwise believe will be either easiest to code or will best reflect what their prospective customers may want to see. This means that is unlikely that any two systems will reflect a singular common understanding of the market. The result is that every system, though they may use similar languages and terms, reflects a unique way of capturing very basic and fundamental information that is otherwise comm on to the industry. © Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2014 This lack of a common lexicon reflected in the underlying data structures leads to wasted time and resources by both the software vendors and the users of these systems. The vendors recreate what has been previously built by their competitors as they build-out this code, and the customers are forced to learn the unique methods and data structures used by the vendor in order to build and maintain complex integration infrastructures to move data in and out of the system, or to even develop reports that detail the deals and transactions in the system.