I recently checked-in with Keith Thibodeaux, Enuit’s head of sales for the Americas, to see how the firm fared during last year’s challenges and how he sees the market shaping up in 2021. As he and most others had pointed out, 2020 was certainly different from anything anyone in this industry has ever experienced. And though it clearly didn’t progress as anyone expected when the year began, all in all, it turned out to be a pretty good year for Enuit.
Mr. Thibodeaux noted relative to their North American activity, “We were able to close several new customers in the US in 2020 and, though some implementation projects were stalled for a brief period when the pandemic happened, we were able to stay on track and bring four new clients into production during the year. Additionally, we saw a number of existing customers growing their business with us by adding additional capabilities and seat licenses.” In terms of areas of market activity during the year, he noted strong interest from a variety of segments including refined products, metal concentrates, natural gas, NGLs and LNG.
As far as what he sees as trends in the North American markets, Mr. Thibodeaux believes demand in the energy space will continue to pick up as prices have recovered and recent cold snap in the south and central states have exposed weaknesses in being able to effectively manage exposures. He noted that in particular, he sees strong demand in the NGL and refined products space to not only continue, but to further increase. “We’ve been expanding our liquids logistics capabilities and continuing to build out interfaces to other logistics systems, including truck ticketing and rack solutions…and we think we are well-positioned to address the needs of liquids centric companies, particularly in allowing them to better hedge their positions as they redirect movements to take advantage of daily price changes.”
From a technology standpoint, he doesn’t believe all implementations will be conducted virtually, but certainly the vast majority will be. To that point he noted that while there are some advantages of having consultants physically on-site, deploying the product in the cloud and utilizing a remote team offers the client a much larger pool of experts to draw from. “With the impacts of the pandemic, we’ve noticed much more interest in hosted solutions that better enable remote implementations. With the option of hosting in either Azure or AWS, we’ve seen more customers turning to the cloud to ensure their business continues uninterrupted should something like the pandemic occur again in the future.”
Though Enuit has continued to grow their presence in the Asia Pacific and European markets, with new offices opening and new staff being hired, Mr. Thibodeaux is quick to point out that their North American presence continues to grow as well. “Where other vendors have been laying off staff this last year, we’ve been adding folks across almost all groups in our Houston office and the others. With the additions we’ve made here, we’ve continued to grow our local support and development to service our expanding North American customer base.”
Enuit is certainly one of the companies that has fared the best this last year, leveraging not only their growing success in AsiaPac, but also finding opportunity in Europe and North America in what was a tough market for many. With the upturn in energy prices and growing activity in upstream and midstream markets, we do expect they will continue to grow their market share in North American, and particularly in natural gas and liquids.
Original post here: https://www.ctrmcenter.com/blog/vendor-news-blog/enuit-a-north-america-update-and-outlook/
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