Fendahl Sees A Strong 2024 In Sight
I spoke recently with Fendahls’ Henry Thornalley who told me that it was a busy market right now for CTRM and related software. “We have seen a significant uptick in the last 12-months in terms of activity levels,” he said. For Fendahl, 2021 and 2022 were great years for adding new names whereas 2023 was slower, he told me. 2024 so far has been very active and represents a significant improvement for Fendahl over 2023. Fendahl has what Henry terms a hyperfocus on North America right now where interest in its solutions appears to be running high. It has closed three natural gas deals there recently and has hired in a team to focus on it led by Michael Snayd. It has also added implementation resources there to help it with implementations.
On the implementation side, Fendahl continues to carefully seek out and groom implementation partners among consulting firms. “We have always done all implementations ourselves,” he said. “However, we are now trying to also build relationships with selected consulting forms to help with implementations. We have already started working with such partners in the US.” This effort has also been led locally by Michael Snayd.
Fendahl has seen most of its sales activity in the Asia-Pac and North American markets to date. “Much of the activity we see in Europe right now is in areas that we don’t serve so well and where we are adding capability like European gas, for example, to be more competitive in European markets” he told me. Meanwhile, Fendahl is also capitalizing on the activity in Dubai where it has seen success in a series of smaller deals in the oil side of commodities. Dubai is another location where it has added staff to help it find for and gain new business. “While metal concentrates and Ags were our original sweet spot, more recently we seem to be doing a lot of oil and gas deals,” he said. “In the coming weeks and months, we do hope to roll out a steady stream of press announcements like the recent Mieco announcement.”
On the product side of things, Henry is excited by developments around AI. “We are focusing on AI in areas like reporting and data conversion where it really has some application,” he said and pointed to some expected and anticipated developments in that area later in the year.
