Message from the CEO
The current financial crisis is making it clear to all stakeholders that
enterprise risk management is crucial for the future of the company. Credit rating agencies are starting to put more emphasis on a solid Risk Management system and this will help lower the cost of capital for companies. In addition to this we see that external auditors are increasing pressure on companies that they should have solid systems in place that create an audit trail throughout the company during the year. All these trends in the industry will help us to further expand our global footprint.
The industry is in great turmoil. There are more than 1,300 companies that are being tracked and traced by industry analysts, that talk about Governance, Risk and Compliance on their website. In this global market it is key that we clearly communicate to our audience, including customers and partners, what our position is compared to all the other GRC vendors. Our opinion is that if you measure the different vendors based on strategic business criteria such s revenue, profitability, global reach, blue chip customer base, ability to execute, and on the ability to attract additional capital to finance possible acquisitions, then BWise is one of the two pure play GRC vendors that will continue to lead the pack.
Looking back
In 2009, BWise closed numerous strategic deals, paving the way to an excellent 2010. Forrester’s recognition of BWise as a leader in Enterprise GRC Platforms, the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms was a great moment of glory for the BWise team across the world. We all were very proud that this company, which was founded back in 1994, was able to make such an impact in the world on Governance Risk and Compliance. In August of 2009 Gartner also put Bwise in the Leader quadrant of the Governance Risk and Compliance report. Let me share with you why I am convinced that we stand out compared to any other vendor in our industry.
BWise is different
We are the only vendor in the Governance Risk and Compliance industry with an embedded
process management vision and solution. This long-term vision now pays dividends, as it greatly reduces compliance costs for our clients and improves quality. We continue to hear from our customers that their main drivers are to reduce cost for compliance. With the BWise smart compliance approach we can help our customers to realize a 20-30% decrease in compliance related costs when investing in our technology and solutions. By approaching it from a risk perspective and implementing our solution for all of your regulatory requirements, we can now help you to limit your number of controls and to use the controls that you test more efficiently, for all of your compliance obligations. Our vision to implement a risk-based approach, preceding a controls-based approach, sets us apart from other solutions in the industry.
BWise employees are different
We are pleased with our extremely high retention rate of employees. This enables us to keep our experience and knowledge within our organization and it is for that reason that most of our consultants have more than 3-5 years of experience with BWise and our technology and solutions. More than 50% of our employees have one or more master of science degrees. 35% of our employees and contracted resources, and more than 50% of our sales team members, work outside the Netherlands. This is a strong indication that BWise has changed from a local Dutch player into a global software company with local support on three continents in India, the Netherlands and the U.S.
Our professional services team and helpdesk have been involved in over 500 implementations of GRC
We are the most experienced vendor out there. We have certified and trained employees from our partners to greatly increase the scalability of our implementation capacity. Our support team has expanded significantly and the support desk now is able to answer calls 24/5. Our consultants travelled this year from Honk Kong to Paris, from Washington to South Africa and Kuwait.
We continue to receive great industry recognition from leading analysts. Respected analysts such as Forrester, AMR, Gartner and Capgemini have ranked BWise highly in their reports. Capgemini positioned BWise as a leader in the industry with the most comprehensive product suite. In 2009, we will continue to invest in our R&D efforts to further enhance our product portfolio. Our key focus will remain centered on making our product more robust and scalable than that of our competitors. Our largest implementation supports more than 48,000 key controls with several thousand users.
Additional areas of focus for this year are
- Further enhancing the user friendliness of our products
- Lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Improving reporting capabilities by creating more dashboards and standard reports
- Continuing to expand interoperability with third party technology including leading players in the industry while supporting open standards.
- We will continue to invest more than the industry average of our revenue back into our R&D to ensure the highest level of innovation backed by trusted industry best practices.
Customer satisfaction is our key driver
We will continue customer surveys amongst our customers. We have interviewed more than 25 companies in one on one meetings to learn how they have experienced and implemented BWise. We asked what were their ambitions, and what were the objectives and milestones they hoped to achieve. And most importantly, we addressed how BWise helped them achieve their strategic goals. We have carefully evaluated the responses of our customers and have integrated that back into our products and also into our services organization. Best practices are now taught in our BWise Academy and are used as part of our standard project plans. We will continue to upgrade our best practices templates and standard project plans to leave our customers extremely satisfied.
We continued with our successful series of webinars that are centered around educating our customers on using the full functionality of our products and learning from others about best practices with BWise and our solutions.
We have held several customer board sessions both in Europe and in the US.
Thank you!
I trust that by sharing this information, you will see BWise is on the right track, and that you, as a customer, have selected a company that continuously invests in its products and organization.
Thank you for being our customer and for your continued support as we continually strive to help you optimize your Risk and Compliance Management programs.
On behalf of Team BWise
Robert Pijselman,
CEO
