London, November 2010

CommodityPoint: Commodity trading and risk management activities involve vast quantities of data and, as markets mature and increase in speed, the amount and frequency of that data is increasing. Making sense of that data and managing it in such a way as to transform it into actionable information has become one of the key challenges for commodity trading companies.

Data comes from many sources; both external and internal. Pricing data, weather data, news, risk data and more besides. It often comes from multiple sources in different formats and for different time scales at different points in the day. Internally, much of the data is recorded in trading and risk management software [ CTRM software] but these systems are often notorious for readily capturing data but providing little in the way of usable reports or reporting tools to inspect and analyze that captured data. Additionally, other systems contain data that is important including; accounting systems, contract systems, trading systems and more.

CommodityPoint research has consistently shown that the situation is even more complex than might at first be imagined since many trading firms utilize multiple trading and risk solutions for different commodities and these systems are both difficult to integrate and difficult to obtain an enterprise view from without detailed and technical knowledge of the underlying data schema.

The problem is that in order to provide informative dashboards for managers, interactive reporting for users and usable information to inform decisions, sense has to be made of all of this data residing all of these disparate systems. They have to be somehow integrated into a universal and accurate view of the data and sometimes, this needs to be done in near real-time or at least be event driven to insure that the information is both timely and relevant.

What is required to solve these issues is a data management solution that can take disparate data from multiple sources, validate it, cleanse it and place it into a highly usable data store from which it can be easily inspected. One such solution is Hyper Rig's Data Manager.

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CommodityPoint, A Division of UtiliPoint International, Inc., covers the Commodity & Trading and Risk Management software category as an independent analyst and consultant. This software category continues to develop at a rapid rate in conjunction with the changes taking place in commodity markets and commodity trading generally.

www.commoditypoint.com