Commodities & IoT
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – Aristotle
Probably correct, but Let’s talk about this in context of technology landscape for commodities management.
For over 25 years, technology space has seen advancement unlike any other industry and has led tremendous changes on how we run any business. Be it shared services or cloud-based solutions for almost every industry.
The commodity technology landscape for various reasons has been lagging in its adoption of newer technologies. Most ETRM and CTRM software are monolithic systems with enormous technology footprints. Each such system has its sweet spots but none of them provides a “best of the breed” solution for all areas of commodity management.
Though new entrants in ETRM/CTRM space are using newer technologies and infrastructure and offer SaaS and cloud-based solutions, the software platform itself is tightly interwoven among their various modules and those modules are difficult to deploy individually or independently.
As customers become more technologically savvy and have gone through the pains of implementing such solutions at least once if not more, they have started to look towards focused niche systems that solve their specific problem for one of the business functions or processes. They are looking for such platforms being available and their interoperability and integration with other such platforms for different areas of their business such as Trade Management, Trade Life-cycle Processes (Confirmations) Risk Management, Asset Optimization, Logistics, Settlements and Accounting.
This does not mean that each such solution must come from a different company. More than one solution or platform could come from one company, but customers gets to choose which platform(s) they want to select from each.
Let’s call this future technology landscape for commodities industry as “Commodities-IoT” or “C-IoT.” This ecosystem will offer a collection of niche software platforms that can be implemented and integrated with each other to provide greater efficiency and value to the commodities trading firms of all kinds. This will also help in bringing solutions for additional business processes into the fold that are currently not integrated with the traditional commodity management software landscape.
From the vendor’s perspective, such offering would start with key concept of distributed architecture that allows each platform to not just work independently but with minimal master data and integration needs. Provide them an ecosystem of small point solutions on the cloud that provides much greater value than any single system could.
As newer technology concepts have put old ones to rest, in this context, it’s probably time to put what Aristotle said to rest as well.
OneCore Global provides platforms for electronic exchange and matching for Confirmations and Invoices. To learn more about OneCore Global’s in-cloud commodities management software solutions, click here.