MESSAGE from the CEO

2007 was a record year for BWise, paving the way to an excellent start for 2008 led by numerous strategic deals. We have increased our license revenue by more than 60% compared to last year and our profitability increased more than 200%. Forrester’s recognition of BWise as the frontrunner in overall GRC capabilities in the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms 2007 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. 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 the 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.

 

Expanding our professional services team and helpdesk

We have again doubled our professional services organization in the last 12 months with new consultants and project managers. This January a class of 9 new employees continued their careers at BWise. 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.
In 2007, we shipped and implemented software across the globe, from China, to Canada and from Norway to Spain.

We continue to receive great industry recognition from leading analysts

Respected analysts such as Forrester, AMR, Gartner and Cap Gemini have ranked BWise highly in their reports. Cap Gemini positioned BWise as a leader in the industry with the most comprehensive product suite.
For 2008, 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 2008 will be

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.

Introducing new technologies

BWise is pleased that our Web TV is so successful. Many visitors of our website take a look at the customer testimonials. We have also developed an online demo that gives a great overview of broad functionality of our product in just over ten minutes. A selection of videos including best practices, customer success stories and new product demonstrations are now available on our website 24 hours per day.

Customer satisfaction is our key driver

In 2007 we conducted over 75 in depth surveys amongst our customers. We have interviewed more then 20 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 response 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 now 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 have started with a 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. For 2008 we have already scheduled two major customer events on both sides of the Atlantic. Make sure that you will be there.

A big 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