Amphora – A CTRM Phoenix?
Like the proverbial Phoenix, Amphora is reborn under CEO, Chris Mudry, with a new brand and a new website to boot. However, it doesn’t stop there. Mr. Mudry told me that Amphora has signed 3 new clients in recent months and that it has finally consolidated on the 3.4 release that is being tested at the moment and “will go live in November at two of our main clients”, meaning that all users will be on the same code when they upgrade. “We have been putting our house in order,” he said. “After that, we can focus on the next generation software as we have already hired a team to rebuild the engine so we can get there faster.”
“Oil, LPG, LNG, iron ore, coal and shipping are in the DNA of our company and Symphony, but we are also completing our Concentrates solution – Alchemy and have true capabilities in concentrates and metals these days,” Chris told me. Amphora has also a VaR and other modules that it can sell from a rich and increasing war chest of software products.
On competition for Symphony in the oil side, Chris (correctly in our view) says that 2/3rds of the over 100 vendors and products in the marketplace are very small and probably “all for sale,” while the other third are mainly focused on North American and European power & gas. In its traditional turf, the big competitors are now all owned by ION (Aspect, TriplePoint, Rightangle and OpenLink) such that his only consistent competitor is an ION solution these days. They do see other competitors from time to time, but it is largely ION, occasionally Eka, Fendal or Enuit in deals. It is probably for this reason that Chris is focused on getting Amphora’s house in order as there is tremendous potential and in our opinion, demand, for an ION alternative and Amphora certainly could claim rights to that crown.
As a follow up, Amphora kindly provided a demonstration of its new Concentrates solution – Alchemy. David Glasspool, product manager, gave me the demo. Alchemy is based on react web UI, driven by a Java based service driven architecture that exposes data through Open API standards, and you can see straight away that the UI is well thought through and designed. Concentrates are tremendously complicated and even though a couple of existing Amphora clients use Symphony for concentrates, it was never a really ideal solution, David said, hence this new development. Alchemy is in its final year of a three-year development program on iteration 7 of what will be 9, he told me. It will be finished end of Q1 2020 and should have two live customers by Q2 2020.
Being an analyst and vendor agnostic, I still have to say that I found the product extremely functional largely avoiding the pitfalls of a typical concentrates solution to allow accurate valuation, invoicing, hedging and so on for concentrates. It was pretty much all there in the version I saw from contract management, through assays, pricing, costs, payments and invoicing, brand and specifications and much more. For example, the user is not restricted to the final assay or weight but can select any of them and even multiples for pricing and invoicing etc. There are still a few areas to be built out, but this does look a fully functional and usable ‘superior’ product to me at this stage. Interestingly, the development is being performed in such a way that the next generation version of Symphony will share modules so in a way, that project is already underway as well. The final proof will of course be when it is implemented.
Amphora does indeed look to have been reborn and its rebirth has not simply been a scrub up of an aging brand and logo. It appears the company is really cleaning up its act and is focused on its vision.
Keep in touch and sign up to our Newsletter
