CTRM software house of the year: Enuit

Energy Risk Awards 2021: Steady growth for vendor’s multi-commodity platform as it captures commodities expansion trend

Ganesh Natarajan, Enuit

Undeterred by pandemic-era working restrictions, Enuit spent the last year growing its client base, adding new staff, cutting implementation times on key projects and launching its Entrade Unite platform that adds enterprise resource planning (ERP) to its Entrade commodity trading and risk management (CTRM) suite. 

The vendor’s Americas business inked three key new deals last year, including one implementation with a large integrated energy company that deals with two billion cubic feet of natural gas and 400,000 barrels of crude oil per day across numerous pipelines. In Europe, Enuit signed up two more clients in the petrochemicals and natural gas markets. One of these implementations was delivered fully remotely in just three months.

To support these new deals, Enuit added 35 new team members worldwide, opening a new office in India in January 2021. 

The new Entrade Unite platform, which was launched in early 2020, connects elements of ERP to a CTRM system to enable clients to integrate trading and risk data into their supply chain functions.

Enuit’s chief operating officer, Ganesh Natarajan, says the technology vendor’s focus on both the customer and the product has been key to its success over the past year. CTRM product development is conducted centrally by a team in Houston, while customer service is carried out regionally. With the latter, the firm aims to be in, or as close to, customers’ time zones as possible.

“We have a strong centralised function for all product strategy and decisions,” Natarajan says. “Localised product development would increase costs and make upgrades more difficult for our customers. On the other hand, we serve our customers locally, and those teams communicate customer feedback to the centralised product development teams.” 

For Enuit, maintaining a high standard of customer service is key to its offering. “Our customers are looking for an agile and nimble vendor, but there is also a consciousness in the way we do business,” says Natarajan. “And we try to pass all of that on to our customers as well.”

Natarajan also believes that Entrade’s multi-commodity functionality has attracted customers that are expanding into more markets – a very real possibility as companies face a likely transition to a low-carbon world in future decades. “Entrade is very uniquely positioned as a multi-commodity solution because customers entering new markets do not need to buy another ETRM system and go through a long implementation process,” he says.

In the current market environment, however, Natarajan attributes Entrade’s recent growth to market participant’s interest in investing in technology that will underpin the digital transformation that many energy companies are currently navigating.

“Clients are looking for centralised data management – having everything in one place across the front, middle and back office – cloud capabilities and the ability to export the data out of the system to report to senior management or suppliers and counterparties,” Natarajan says. “This need for transparency is driving a lot of investment in commodity technology at present. At any point in time, companies need to know where their business stands, and need to be able to communicate that to manage expectations in the remote working world.”

Physical energy trading requires more nuanced capabilities than financial trading, Natarajan believes. Combined with current trends towards working collaboratively but from different locations, if working remotely, this means energy companies require a more robust technology infrastructure than ever before. “As the need for flexibility in relation to working patterns becomes the new normal, energy companies need to have the right tools to enable employees to do their jobs effectively.”

In order to support clients in this way, Natarajan says Enuit has developed several new capabilities, particularly in relation to the ERP element of Entrade Unite. In addition to stock management functionality, advanced business activity tracking and customer profile management, Enuit has been developing an accounting module over the past year that is currently being tested by several clients.

This element addresses a common disconnect between the risk language and the accounting language spoken by different parts of the business, Natarajan says. “To work with multi-commodity customers, we knew that any accounting integration had to be less painful and that our success relied on proper integration,” he adds. “We have not slowed down when it comes to marching forward with that kind of product development.”