White Papers Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM | Page 5

Is Now the Time for Open Source in CTRM?

A ComTech Advisory Whitepaper

SO, IS THERE A BETTER WAY?
Several years ago, a company called TradeWell Systems sought to launch an open source version of their ETRM
integration product, called Enyware. The vision of the company’s president, Andrew Bruce, was to provide an open
source product that, once interfaces were developed to the various ETRM/CTRM products commercially available
at the time, the market would quickly adopt as a standard integration hub for the industry.

Each company would contribute their interfaces
and other improvements into the product (incidentally, you can still find the code for EnyWare
here: www.sourceforge.net/projects/enyware).
TradeWell would make money by selling support,
much like Redhat maintains a supported version of
Linux. While the company ultimately wasn’t successful due to limited funding, the vision of open source
in ETRM/CTRM is probably even more intriguing
today.

Just what would happen if one of the new
or existing ETRM/CTRM vendors decided to throw
their product, in a stripped-down or basic version,
out into the market for free as open source code?
Certainly, most trading companies, regardless of
whether or not they are currently using some other
vendor’s product, would want to see what it’s about

and would probably bring it into their shop to take a look at it. If the open
sourced “product” was able to address the fundamental needs (like contract and deal capture) of enough market participants, and had a clear
and easily extendable architecture, then it is certainly conceivable that
more than one would think about what they could do with it…even perhaps up to replacing their expensive vendor supplied systems. Others,
including those that didn’t have a system or were looking to replace
their existing system, would be remiss if they didn’t at least take a look
at how they could use it, and in the process, save a significant amount of
money on the front-end by avoiding the license fees that normally come
with such systems.

Should such a scenario play out, it would certainly disrupt the
CTRM software industry. Instead of building new products from the
ground up, software vendors would need to concentrate on developing
the tools and capabilities that ultimately distinguish one vendor from
another – things like sophisticated analytics, regulatory reporting and
complex multimodal logistics models.

WHAT WOULD OPEN SOURCE IN
CTRM LOOK LIKE?
The idea that each market participant’s needs and therefore their installation, is essentially different and hence, this
can’t be seen as a true package market, is an idea we have expressed on many occasions over the years.

At most, we would expect any CTRM packaged
solution to be only a 70% to 80% fit to any individual company’s requirements. This means that every
installation has, by necessity, a high proportion of

© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2014

custom add-ons, components and other functionality. Vendors have to
target a large enough portion of the available market to sustain themselves by building in significant configurability and personalization in order to avoid a good deal of specific client customization but, at the end