Transcript

Howard: So, if that's not a reasonable expectation, what are the solutions to these [ETRM] challenges?

Sterling: I appreciate what I'm saying could sound like bad news, but this is how markets change and shift over time. Certainly, these are just the advancements and iterations that they go through.

So, I think right now we're going to see an increasing responsibility on third parties and actually customers themselves to create complementary – and, I sometimes call them satellite systems – around these kind of monolithic CTRM engines. I think we're already seeing that, and in recent years, it's becoming fairly common.

Actually, I'll give one quick example of reporting. So, we see people shifting from the reporting styles within these systems, and it's very common to shift these things out to Tableau, Power BI, Excel, all sorts of things. That's pretty common from kind of trading shop to trading shop.

That is almost an expected component of an initial implementation these days. So, I think that is going to gain ground, and for the customers who are tech savvy, I think we're going to see them starting to realize that they can meet their own needs. It'll just be interesting to see how that goes.

I also think the question is: how is it that customers and third parties can provide these satellite systems? This is going to put pressure on a topic that I've talked about before, but it’s interoperability. This concept basically means the ability of a system to speak very quickly and readily with many other systems within its ecosystem.

In the RightAngle space, I would speak to that I think this has been a massive success by the vendor to create quite literally hundreds of open APIs. What is the interoperability grade that I would give to that platform? I'd probably give it an A+ at this point.

It's very open, and they are cooperating with those sorts of ideas and saying – yes, we want our data to be accessible to other systems. We want to be able to bring data in and out from other systems as well. So, I think we're going to see increasing pressure for these major systems to have very open front doors, side doors, back doors, and all of these things will need lots of APIs really to put it in straight tech speak.

That'll be a big component of the future.