ABC’s – Amsterdam, Brady PLC and the Cloud
Last week I attended Brady PLC’s CAB in Amsterdam. It was extremely well attended and very well organized event that I am sure that Brady’s customers enjoyed and found valuable. For me, it was an opportunity to learn a lot more about Brady’s strategy, products and customers.
The conference opened with Brady CEO, Gavin Lavelle, presenting an overview and update on the company. Brady has just released its interim results and so these were the major theme of his address. Eleven new clients were signed in the first half of the year with more than a third of them being located outside of Europe. Seven of those were Brady Energy and three were on the recycling side. The half-year financials were also good with revenues up 5% (14% on a constant currency level basis) to 15.6m GBP and EBITDA margin up to 20%. The company has over 6m GBP in cash and no debt. Mr. Lavelle also went through the companies focus in terms of energy, commodities and recycling. Of particular note perhaps is that recycling is a $500bn industry annually with lots of potential for Brady.
Next came a presentation by Mr. Andrew Williams of Baringa on the regulatory environment in energy and commodities with an emphasis on MiFiD2. Mr. Jon Hobbs, Group CTO of Brady then provided an update on the technology roadmap. To me, this was an important presentation as Brady has acquired a number of products and integration is always a concern. In essence, Brady uses an SOA architecture to provide that integration and is building out a comprehensive set of services in the cloud as it adds common functionality across the products.
Mr. Hobbs presented Brady’s cloud strategy, which is already very advanced and demonstrated various new services that have or are about to be made available. On the energy side, the Elviz product is already available in the cloud, EDIS and EBIS are being deployed and the new Regulatory Reporting for EMIR functionality is a new service too. The cloud is important to Brady both in terms of its revenue model where the company is focusing on repeatable revenues and to its product strategy where it expects to bring to market new services on a cost effective and rapid basis.
For the remainder of the conference, I attended the Brady Commodities stream to catch up with what was going on and planned by the company there. I also gave my own presentation to the Commodities breakout group on the five big issues in commodity management.
It was a well-spent couple of days and I thank Brady PLC for inviting me.
Keep in touch and sign up to our Newsletter
