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ACL is followed by a number of industry analysts. Here is a sampling of
research:
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Market Kingpins
Accelerate GRC Agendas
John Hagerty - March 15, 2007
"Specialist continue to have strong voice in GRC marketThe original movers and shakers in the GRC space were the best-in-class providers. While some have been snapped up—for example, Stellent bought by Oracle, Certus rolled into Securac, Virsa Systems purchased by SAP, Applimation’s GRC business acquired by LogicalApps—others maintain growing business models and extended product footprints, such as the following:
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Continuous Monitoring of Financial
Transactions – Why It's a Priority for Sustainable Compliance
John Van Decker - April 2006
"Companies must attempt to satisfy demands for greater financial transparency
and corporate accountability in a business environment characterized by numerous
challenges, including:
- Complex business processes that are not standardized across divisions, functions,
or geographies
- Fragmented and inconsistent data sources
- Manual and error-prone financial processes
- Minimal use of automated controls
- Substantial complexity and poor integration in IT architectures
For compliance-related risk management to be effective, senior executives must
develop IT and finance strategies that are linked to business performance management
(BPM) at the corporate level."
Download report...
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Continuous
Controls Monitoring: Where To Start?
William McNeill - November 9, 2005
"As accelerated filers complete Year 2 activities to
comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), companies are investigating ways to
automate activities to make compliance repeatable, sustainable, and cost-effective.
For many, including those organizations still facing down first-year activities,
Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) is a next logical step to take a large
chunk of human effort out of the ongoing process. At this year’s OpenPages user
conference in Boston, a panel of CCM vendors, moderated by AMR Research’s John
Hagerty, addressed five important questions companies want answered about when,
where, and how to deploy CCM technologies effectively. Panel members included
John Verver, vice president of professional services at ACL Services; Arthur
Stewart, principal at Greenlight Technologies; Patrick Taylor, CEO of Oversight
Systems; and Dr. Mark Feldman, senior vice president of business development
at Virsa Systems."
Download report...
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Untitled Document
The Bottom Line:
For 2006 and beyond, automating compliance activities is Job No. 1, with software
vendors providing most of the pieces of a complex compliance puzzle
John Hagerty, William McNeill, Ryan Garvey (Profiles in Compliance) -
September 15, 2005
"How do you make sense of all your compliance options?
Earlier this year, we published the AMR Research Report "Landscape of Sarbanes-Oxley
Compliance Tools," January 2005, to provide companies with baseline information
on vendors that deliver risk management and internal control documentation software
for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 404 requirements. SOX has made most companies
hypersensitive to any mention of "compliance." Now, organizations
are seeing compliance concerns – not just SOX concerns – in many different
areas of the business. Questions from evaluators arise from many quarters:
- What compliance-related activities should we automate? How far should any
automation go?
- What should we do now? What can wait until later?
- Should we take a preventive approach or an audit approach to testing and
enforcing controls?
- How far should we delve into risk management?
- Which IT architecture extends most naturally from my existing infrastructure
today?
- Which compliance programs are related? Can one or a handful of investments
address multiple mandates? Can we apply the same concepts from compliance
to improve the quality of transactions processed through existing business
systems?
We won’t address each question individually because each answer depends
on the unique situation at every firm. We do provide a framework for managing
future compliance initiatives and a guide for assessing vendors that can help
you meet your company’s long-term compliance and governance goals."
Download report...
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Controls
Monitoring Solutions Gaining Momentum
Paul Hamerman with Ian Schuler - August 29, 2005
"Following the wave of adoption of solutions for documenting
and assessing internal controls as required by Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 and
OMB Circular A-123 in the US, software for ongoing monitoring and optimization
of internal controls is rapidly emerging. Whereas testing of controls on a sample
basis is labour-intensive and incomplete, contonuous controls monitoring solutions
can test and validate controls for virtutally every transaction. These solutions,
in some cases, can also be used to prevent controls violations from occurring
by enforcing controls during transaction execution. Approaches by controls monitoring
vendors vary from analysis of transactional data to controlling access and monitoring
proper application of business rules."
Solution Leaders are Starting to Emerge
"To date, Virsa Systems and ACL Services provide the most traction in continuous
controls monitoring ... ACL builds on its heritage in audit software to provide
an analytics solution for monitoring controls in the context of financial transactions."
More information/purchase
report from Forrester Research...
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