To my utter amazement I was able to come up with twenty-five different CTRM solutions for Ags and I will be honest, its not inconceivable that I missed a few! If you pop over to the CTRMCenter directory you can check out my assertion by looking at all the suppliers listed there.
The CTRM for Ags space reminds me a lot of ETRM back in the late 1990’s. Back then, there were probably 30 or so potential suppliers of energy trading and risk management solutions. Some of them were regionally focused and some were specific to a particular energy commodity like power, gas or crude. Names like Altra, Caminus, TransEnergy, KWI, EnerX, ESI, DC Systems, Riskworks, and more come to mind thinking about it. Of course, many were subsequently acquired in roll ups and some simply went out of business altogether. Some remain today.
I think it might well be the same way in the Ags space. If you look at the different solutions you immediately understand that some are regionally focused while others are in reality focused on different soft commodities such as Coffee, Rubber, Grains, Sugar etc. Of course, they all claim coverage of all soft commodities but the reality is that some are stronger than others by virtue of how they got started in specific ags. Perhaps the big difference between the Ag CTRM solution landscape and the old ETRM solution landscape is that one or two of the players are truly global, multi-commodity, E/CTRM systems like OLF, TPT and Brady. However, I have to believe that sooner or later, we will see some consolidation in this sector as some of these more regionally or commodity-specific vendors get acquired or simply peter-out over the next several years.