Brady ETRM Revitalized
Back in the day, the old Brady PLC acquired two competing ETRM vendors active in Scandinavian power markets and beyond. Eventually, Brady settled on one of the platforms – rebranded as Brady ETRM – as its key platform but then it later acquired Igloo – another ETRM software platform, which initially created a lack of surety around the future of Brady ETRM in the minds of some customers and employees at the time. Indeed, the software also became the target of competitors seeking to replace it. Despite these challenges, Brady Technologies’ ETRM Business Lead, David Gallacher, and his team have worked tirelessly to ensure that Brady ETRM and Igloo both found and cemented their place in the European ETRM software market.
The first thing that David is keen to point out is that Igloo and Brady ETRM target somewhat different markets. While Igloo, a cloud-native SaaS product, is largely focused on financial traders, Brady ETRM has a sizeable and important installed base amongst physical players, especially in the Nordics, that utilize it and wish to see it continue to evolve. “Brady ETRM is a solid product for the European market,” he said, “It is well designed and functionally rich and we believe it to be superior to many of the other products on the market.” The acquisition of Igloo was based on the idea of targeting a different part of the market at the time – smaller firms with a derivative-rich portfolio. Getting customers and even staff, to understand the differences has been a key and integral challenge, he said.
When David joined, his first task was to stabilize Brady ETRM, which he did by developing a vision for the platform and communicating that to customers and staff. He had to get the message out and back that up with execution commitment and delivery. This was performed partially by restructuring the team deploying seasoned technical account managers to ensure that customers were constantly involved and communicated with. At the same time, Brady had to deliver the upgrades and enhancements on the software that were in the product development plan. By 2023, David says that Brady had largely succeeded as revenues from enhancements and delivery was the best it had been in years and all customers were happy and were upgrading to the latest version of the software. He also credits support from Brady Management in achieving these goals and points out that the Brady Bergen team has moved to a new office location and staff are motivated and in recent employee surveys, happy. It was, he said, a big turnaround.
David now has responsibility for both Brady ETRM and Igloo. Brady ETRM’s roadmap calls for a lot of changes in UI, which will be modernized to provide users an easier way to access its underlying “powerful functionality.” An entirely new reporting solution has also been developed and released that allows users PowerBI access. Additionally, the Igloo EEX connector has been used within Brady ETRM to provide an almost instant solution particularly for the Nordic customers, he told me. He also plans to use Brady ETRM to add depth of functionality to Igloo over time – “It’s a case of how to harness the best aspects of both platforms for the other,” he said. Meanwhile, delivering bespoke changes to Brady ETRM is a matter of a month or two of work and he believes that is a differentiator against some of the legacy products in the market which can take months and years to provide a response to market changes.
The future of Brady ETRM is assured, and the product is a profitable aspect of Brady’s business. Igloo is also expanding its footprint and coverage – even beyond energy commodities on the derivatives side. The platforms target different parts of the market at the moment however, over time, both platforms will continue to be upgraded and modernized and there could be a possibility to merge them into one in the much longer-term.
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