I was in Dallas recently to meet with Allegro’s senior management team for a briefing on the company’s recent activities, their 2016 results and the outlook for the 2017.
Reflecting on their 2016 results, Michael Hinton, Allegro’s chief customer officer & senior vice president of products and solutions, noted that Allegro closed more than 20 net new logo accounts during the year, despite a somewhat slow first half. Areas of particular success were Asia and Europe, where the company gained new customers across multiple commodities and market segments. North America also finished strongly, with several large deals signed in the closing months of the year. Though their accounting books haven’t yet closed, they will show year over year revenue growth…though with the downturn in the industry over the last couple of years, we suspect the rate will probably be somewhat below that of the record growth years they had prior to collapse in commodity prices in mid-2014.
On the product front, Allegro launched their new flagship solution, Horizon, in 2016. This new product is a re-architected and upgraded solution derived from Allegro 8; and has been developed with a modular architecture with specific modules designed to address the needs of clearly defined vertical market segments. This approach allows customers to license and deploy only the components their businesses (and industries) require – reducing the product footprint, license cost, and maintenance requirements versus a traditional monolithic solution. They also believe the new architecture provides faster, less costly implementations and improved overall performance and scalability when deployed either in the cloud or in a traditional on-premises installation.
Looking forward to the new year, Allegro notes that even though it’s early, 2017 does appear to be carrying forward the momentum of an improving market they saw in the last half of 2016. This is in-line with our expectations for the global CTRM markets as well – as increasing commodity prices and higher levels of price volatility will encourage continuing loosening of constrained budgets and allow market participants to catch-up on IT projects that had been deferred over the last 18-24 months.
While a rising sea lifts all ships, with the investments Allegro has made during the recent market downturn in their new product and in the area of customer relations, we do anticipate they will continue to outperform much of their competition and be one of the top contenders in most of the available opportunities in 2017.
