Commodity analytics vendors have faced a difficult market environment in the past 18 months. One of the biggest challenges has been convincing firms to dedicate a portion of their IT spending to analytics, notes Chris Strickland, co-founder and chief executive of London-based vendor Lacima. Instead, commodity trading firms have had to allocate a growing amount of their already stretched IT budgets for meeting reporting requirements imposed by laws such as the US Dodd-Frank Act and the European