Compliance automation software maker OpenPages launched three new products on Jan. 22, touting its ability to help companies manage operational risks and IT governance to meet both external regulations and internal security mandates.

The three products launched by OpenPages, based in Waltham, Mass., include a general compliance management package, a set of IT governance tools and an overarching framework meant to help companies oversee all of their compliance software systems.

OpenPages also announced a list of companies who have added support for its newest products, including BEA Systems, Deloitte Consulting and Oracle.

Dubbed OpenPages GCM, the general compliance management suite offers to aid companies in the creation and management of IT and business processes that allow them to pass muster with organizational data-handling regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

Among the primary benefits of the package is the ability to allow companies to re-use their existing compliance processes to cut down on redundant efforts, a common problem among many large enterprises, according to OpenPages executives.

The product also promises to automate the testing and review of compliance processes, and provide workers with a set of dashboards that offer a centralized view of the status of different projects and IT systems.

In the company's IT governance package, which is labeled as OpenPages ITG, the software maker promises to help companies align IT processes and policies to address multiple regulations, and test those guidelines to ensure they meet industry standards that have been established, including the Cobit and ISO frameworks.

Another goal of the ITG product is to help business workers and IT teams improve communication as they establish and maintain compliance processes that will help their employers meet regulatory requirements.

A lack of standardized communications between business and IT is a common refrain from firms that are looking to streamline their compliance operations, OpenPages officials said.

For instance, many companies have allowed their business unit to create individual compliance management systems for issues of payroll or data access, and are now pushing to use the same approach throughout all of their operations.

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Doing so not only helps businesses save time and effort, but also makes life easier on compliance auditors, said Brian Cleary, vice president of marketing at OpenPages.

"They [business and IT] speak different languages and often don't fully understand each other," Cleary said. "We're trying to unify organizational efforts to help these different workers better understand risks in their business, and avoid the creation of duplicate controls that address the same types of processes."

To help companies further integrate all of their compliance efforts under a single umbrella, the software maker also announced the launch of its OpenPages Governance Platform 5.0,which promises to manage the two newly-announced modules, as well as the firm's two existing products that address automation of operational governance and federal compliance regulations, respectively.

In addition to helping customers to unify management of all their compliance automation systems, including those made by other software vendors, the framework aims to help organizations understand risks and processes shared across business units, and coordinate projects to limit the impact of compliance efforts on day-to-day business operations and performance.

"This isn't only about automation, it's about creating a high-level decision support framework that allows companies to see where their compliance efforts fail and do root cause analysis," Cleary said.

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