Compassoft.

• Position: GRC SOFTWARE - Enterprise spreadsheet governance, risk and compliance

Compassoft, a provider of enterprise spreadsheet governance, risk and compliance (GRC) controls, has announced the rollout of Compassoft Enterprise 4.0. The company calls it "the first spreadsheet GRC management solution to offer an extensible and open architecture for sharing distributed risk information in spreadsheets with enterprise risk and performance management systems, including GRC platforms, business intelligence (Bl) tools and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems."

With this release, Compassoft includes a customizable and highly graphical GRC spreadsheet dashboard that leverages the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company's business policy-based control framework. For companies that are already using other management systems as part of their GRC strategy, Compassoft's information is also readily available for use in their existing dashboards and portals, and can be directly incorporated into their workflow systems. This quickly exposes control-policy violations within the thousands of spreadsheets and PC databases in the enterprise.

Through Enterprise 4.0, Compassoft provides an unprecedented open spreadsheet control data structure and Web services that allow spreadsheet risk management information to be incorporated into existing management systems dashboards, portals and workflows to support an integrated enterprise risk strategy.

"Spreadsheet risk management is an essential component for any successful enterprise GRC strategy," says Robert Kugel, research director for Financial Performance Management at Ventana Research...