ComTech Analyst Briefing Note Eka
July 2015 Update
Analyst Note Update Eka recently announced a new product line, separate and apart from their other product offerings based on the InSight CM platform. This new product, Commodity Analytics Cloud, does represent a departure from other commodity management products on the market and we believe it potentially represents a new software category within the CTRM marketplace. As such, we are providing this Analyst Briefing Note update to provide some of our early views. For a more complete coverage of Eka, including a corporate overview, strategy discussion and products overview, by ComTech analysts, please refer to our most recently updated ComTech Analyst Briefing Note released in November 2014.
Eka’s Commodity Analytics Cloud Eka recently announced the release of a new product that it terms the Commodity Analytics Cloud. According to the company, the goal of the new application is to accelerate information flow and analysis for commodity trading and commodity management companies. The solution crosses several categories of technology and software, including integration solutions, BI tools, analytics, Big Data solutions, data cubes and cloud offerings; and as such, it’s a product that is difficult to slot in any single existing solution category. Leveraging what Eka calls a “Commodity Intelligence Engine”, the system uses preconfigured and/or user definable apps to provide rapid analysis and insights into the critical issues facing business users, including physical/financial positions, P&L, risk exposures, supply chain performance, forecasting and more. Eka has already developed a number of apps to answer the most commonly posed questions in the commodity space and the solution provides a user-friendly interface that enables business users to develop their own. The system can process extremely large data sets in very short time periods via in-memory processing to support real-time decision making. Utilizing some of the tools of a Big Data solution, including the use of NoSQL, the product aggregates data from any number of sources, including spreadsheets, E/CTRM applications (Eka’s and/or others), bespoke solutions, data feeds, and ERP/accounting systems.
ComTech Analysis ComTech analysts have reviewed the new solution in a short web demo provided by Eka’s leadership team and product experts. Looking at the current landscape of available E/CTRM solutions, we agree with Eka’s value proposition that many of the current systems in the market were designed and architected as transaction systems and there is a need for additional analytics. While the demo was limited by the nature of the web format, we were impressed with the conceptualization of the product in the use of a “Commodity Intelligence Engine” to contextualize data/information, perform rapid analysis and return answers to pressing business questions via the use of prebuilt “apps”. Eka’s use of the “app” framework is a model very familiar to consumer markets and should be an advantage for the company as they can more easily generate incremental revenues with additional development and sales of easy-to-purchase apps, with little need to engage in the extended sales cycles that typically mark the CTRM space. A key advantage of the solution is what we might call an “intelligent analytics hub”, which provides the ability to analyze information the way business users ask questions, act as one data store for commodity analytics, and integrate critical commodity information that is trapped in multiple and disparate systems (Eka’s or other vendors) including CTRM, accounting, price feeds, market data, and even client bespoke solutions. Eka is using several modern tools, such as NoSQL, that didn’t exist a few years back to support integration into a common commodity analytics data store. Based upon previous experiences with companies have attempted to develop intelligent integration frameworks, these modern tools coupled with competent integration services is key to providing the high-value analytic apps that pull data from multiple sources.
© Commodity Technology Advisory llc
July 2015
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