OpenPages.

• Position: RISK MANAGEMENT - OpenPages Inc.

The incidence of damaging risk events has been increasing, and has become a greater issue for CFOs. That's a prime reason why OpenPages, a Waltham, Mass.-based maker of financial controls management software that has been used primarily for Sarbanes-Oxley internal control compliance, has launched a product designed for an enterprise approach to risk management.

OpenPages has created an Optimum GRCM (Governance, Risk and Compliance Management) Suite; its first product, OpenPages FCM, for Financial Controls Management, has been out for a couple of years. The next application, ORM, for Operational Risk Management, came out earlier this year. Additional modules of IT Risk Management and Strategic Risk Management are projected for release later this year and in early 2007, respectively.

The ORM product is designed to identify, analyze and manage operational risk on an integrated, company-wide basis. Too many companies still rely on homegrown applications and spreadsheets for risk management, and don't have systems that capture complex inter-dependencies among a multitude of risk factors that span geographies, lines of business and functional organizations, said Patrick O'Brien, OpenPages director of product development, in an interview.

He adds that reporting on risk areas requires attention to both internal (management and the...