CTRM Cubed founder and CEO, Simon Piercy sees some potential issues emerging for smaller vendors in energy markets like the UK as on the retail side, there have been many failures in recent weeks and months. Thirteen British energy retailers have gone bankrupt as of last week according to reports by Reuters who identified another seven as vulnerable. But there is also a bright side in that smaller asset holders are doing very well financially from the situation, he told me. “We just signed another new customer last week and things are going well for us to date,” he said. “We continue to work on the product as well as ally ourselves with other vendors to form an ecosystem of interoperable solutions.”
As a start-up offering a low-cost monthly fee-based cloud solution, Simon does have one observation of the market that I found both salient and important. He observed that in a market where the deployment model is increasingly SaaS in the cloud, why is the traditional RFI/RFP process still dominating the procurement process he asked. It is a good question. Increasingly, the SaaS model provides the ability to look at and work with a system and get a good feeling of how it works and stacks up against requirements and competitors. On the other hand, the RFP is expensive, long, and fraught with the potential for issues. These include bias in questions, using templates that have many irrelevant questions and omitting certain questions. Then, you go straight into implementation with a solution that was only ever demonstrated and not actually used. The procurement model needs to change in step with the deployment and financing options? “There should be a point at which buyers can use and evaluate systems rather than simply accept what a vendor writes in an RFP,” he said.
As well as continuing to work on its product, Simon is keen to continue building out its partner ecosystem. “Once you have cloud platforms and vendors with API interfaces, link ups between different solutions become more straightforward,” he said. Recently, CTRM Cubed has been working with Fidectus in areas like electronic confirmations and settlement, he told me. “It’s a win-win,” he said. “It builds out the products on both sides and expands the ecosystem. Then buyers can indeed mix and match components from various vendors how they want.” At the end of the day, CTRM Cubed is focused on delivering what it does – core ETRM – and willing to leave these other areas to other vendors that it can work with.
