IBM has agreed to acquire OpenPages, a company whose
products identify and administer risk and compliance activities via a single
management system. The acquisition will increase IBM’s business analytics
portfolio, allowing it to support compliance and risk-management processes.
Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed. IBM has made
no secret of its attempt to transform business analytics into a mainstream
corporate process, with a variety of products designed to give executives and
decision-makers the ability to analyze information in a “streamlined” and more
user-friendly manner.
OpenPages software offers executives and other
decision-makers a holistic look at their enterprise’s exposures and
vulnerabilities, in turn providing insight into how those risks can affect the
organization in the future. The software covers domains such as operational
risk, financial controls management, IT risk, compliance and internal audits.
“Unforeseen risk can hurt a company’s bottom line as well as
its brand reputation,” Rob Ashe, general manager of business analytics for IBM,
wrote in a Sept. 15 statement. “Integrating risk management systems across
once-divided units and functions is essential to seeing the bigger picture. The
combination of IBM and OpenPages will provide a holistic and consistent
approach to risk management helping companies combine that insight with
performance management to drive better decision making.”
IBM and OpenPages have already collaborated on at least one
initiative, a core data system for the Operational Riskdata eXchange
Association (ORX), a group of 55 major banks.
“Every day we hear firsthand about the risk and
compliance management issues that businesses face, and it’s clear that a new
information architecture is needed to deliver valuable risk intelligence that
empowers risk-based decision making,” Michael Duffy, president and CEO of
OpenPages, wrote in a Sept. 15 statement. “The combination of IBM and OpenPages
software, business products insights and industry expertise will address this
need, helping businesses tackle their complex risk challenges.”
IBM
views analytics as a strategic directive for the company, with a team of
6,000 industry consultants and a network of analytics solution centers; to
further support that mission, the company has spent $11 billion on 19
acquisitions over the past five years. IBM executives estimate that business
analytics will grow to be a $16 billion business by 2015.
IBM’s initiatives include real-time streaming analytics,
which analyze and integrate any type of data input continuously and in real
time. With that infrastructure in place, businesses would receive instant
evaluations about current and future behavior, and then translate that
information into a viable strategy. The OpenPages acquisition, it seems, will
add yet another layer of capability to both that and other IBM analytics.
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