IBM Wednesday announced that more than 20 of its partners are supporting compliance software the systems giant recently released to help customers meet government and industry regulations.
IBM officials said the company has targeted its partners to build solutions, based on IBM software, to address various industry and government regulations.
“Our philosophy around compliance solutions was that as we looked at the whole arena, one of the concerns we had was that there were a lot of specialty solutions that required specialized skills,” said Deb Taufen, IBMs director of content management and information integration. “We said we have a foundation of middleware and we wanted to deliver that to our partners to add that last bit of expertise” to bring the varied solutions to their customers.
Among the IBM partners adopting the companys solutions are Ascential Software Corp., iRise Inc., Hyperion Solutions Corp., Informatica Corp. and SkillSoft plc.
Some IBM partners, such as iRise, Acumen Advanced Technologies Inc. and Blue World Information Technology Inc., are using IBMs Tivoli Security Compliance Manager to help customers deal with regulations such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act (HIPAA), and some local privacy regulations.
Others such as The Abreon Group, QuickCompliance Inc. and SkillSoft are using the IBM Workplace for Business Controls and Reporting tool for meeting requirements such as Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as well as environmental and safety regulations, the company said.
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Other IBM compliance solutions that partners have seized upon are the IBM Content Management for Message Monitoring and Retention and the IBM Basel II Information Management solution, which is aimed at helping financial institutions adhere to industry specifications.
“Over the past few years, weve been working with IBM on Basel II-related risk and compliance solutions for many of our joint customers,” said Mark Register, vice president of global strategic alliances and industry solutions at Ascential. “IBMs reference architecture has grown out of that work and been formalized over the past year or so. There is an increasing awareness in the market that companies must address compliance activities in a coordinated and strategic manner. We see the architecture that IBM has announced recently as a very positive development. It puts in place a formal approach for the market that leverages the strengths of IBM and many of its partners, and can be refined and customized as customers demand. Our partnership with IBM that is built around offerings such as the compliance solutions they are announcing has been very successful.”
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