Riskonnect Gives Large Enterprises Totally Integrated Way to Evaluate
and Manage Risks and Greatly Improve Corporate Planning
SAN FRANCISCO, CA. January 17, 2008─ Businesses just got a better way to manage risks and uncertainty. At the salesforce.com Tour de Force conference here today, RiskonnectTM announced the launch of its robust, strategic enterprise risk management (ERM) system that gathers diverse risk data from across the enterprise in a highly visual manner so that risks are easily identified, assessed, and mitigated. Riskonnect makes managing enterprise risk an efficient, demonstrable, repeatable process rather than a costly, one-time engagement.
Riskonnect enters the market at a time when most businesses are looking to implement ERM systems as strategic planning tools because of regulatory influences, rating agency proposals, and the economic need to take a risk-based approach to everything from strategic decision making to the myriad of compliance activities. Not only should ERM help a business prepare for when things go wrong, a clear understanding of the risks it faces will help the company maximize performance and gain a competitive advantage.
“Businesses need an economical option for risk management in the strategic decision making process,” said Riskonnect CEO Bob Morrell.
Another good reason to implement a comprehensive ERM system like Riskonnect is the growing trend among credit rating firms to include ERM as a measure of a company’s ability to understand, communicate and manage its risks and, subsequently, capitalize on its strengths. Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, is considering plans to add ERM analysis to its corporate credit ratings process this year.
Riskonnect is the only application that allows organizations to consolidate risks in one database so they can easily anticipate and manage the numerous risk relationships that threaten large enterprises today. The system uses influence diagrams to view risks and allows risk owners to “drill down” to observe the causes of risk in any number of areas that impact an organization. Riskonnect not only allows for visual root cause analysis and comprehensive risk assessment, but also allows tracking of ongoing plans for mitigating risks. Effective business decisions can be made by comparing the total impact of a risk on an organization as well as optimizing the spending to mitigate the risk.
Riskonnect is highly configurable, allowing a company to tailor the data tracking and workflow of the system to meet its unique needs.
“Riskonnect’s relational database allows us to link multiple mitigations to multiple risks,” said Kathy Avery, manager of risk assessment and coordination at Atlanta, Ga.-based Southern Company. According to Avery, the energy company looked at about a dozen software products but most were only Sarbanes-Oxley compliance applications.
“The heat map for graphical representation of data and easy deployment of the system were also important factors in our decision to use Riskonnect for Southern Company’s ERM,” said Avery.
Riskonnect chose to build its ERM system on salesforce.com’s Force.com Platform because it is a proven environment in regard to security, implementation, cost savings, and usability. Salesforce.com’s subscription model permits companies to avoid the expense and headache of installing complex software packages that typically require huge outlays of cash for hardware and software upgrades. Access is available from any secure web login, anywhere in the world.
“Building our own platform would have taken at least three years,” said Morrell. “The Force.com Platform allowed us to create a robust product quickly, allowing us to focus on the unique and sophisticated visualization of risks.”
Morrell contends that Force.com’s Platform-as-a-Service is especially important for risk technology. First, risk data is complex, varied, and requires very complicated analytics and reporting. Second, most risk management departments' technology needs play second fiddle to big human resources and other operational applications in their organizations. Getting adequate IT support can be daunting, if not impossible. While delivering the software as a service removes the IT burden of system installation, Riskonnect makes the ERM process efficient enough to become an engrained process in any large organization.
“Riskonnect is an outstanding example of the powerful applications that can be built and delivered on the Force.com Platform,” said Clarence So, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “Their success in providing an enterprise risk management solution for the Southern Company demonstrates the innovation possible with Platform-as-a-Service.”
About Riskonnect
Riskonnect is an innovator in the area of strategic Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) providing comprehensive software solutions for organizations that need to consolidate, manage and mitigate business risks, and report the results to key stake holders including management, the board of directors, third-party auditors and shareholders. Headquartered in Marietta, Georgia, the company developed and sells Riskonnect, a comprehensive ERM application that resides on the Force.com Platform. For more information, go to www.riskonnect.com or email info@riskonnect.com.