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 ARM Release 3.0 (04/07/06)

I am delighted to announce the public launch of release 3.0 of Active Risk Manager.

I am delighted to announce the public launch of release 3.0 of Active Risk Manager.

An expanded team of 15 dedicated developers has been working hard on Release 3.0 since last autumn. It represents our biggest investment to date, and a very significant step forward for Active Risk Manager, our Enterprise Risk Management Strategy and our ability to walk the right path with our customers.

This is a global release, available to any of our customers in the 12 vertical sectors and the diverse risk management functions that we serve.

Themes

The themes of the release are quality, performance and user experience.

• Quality – we have held the release for 5 months to ensure that release 3.0 at launch is delivered to a manufactured level of quality, not a development level, and our thanks in particular to the customers who have aided with both process change recommendations and Beta programs.
• Performance – we now run verifiable and repeatable performance tests using third party software. The performance improvements are detailed in the support area (for existing users) of our website and confirm that under a harsh concurrent regime Active Risk Manager will support over 500 concurrent users and a user population of at least 15,000 users. Why is this important? Because of the scale of our deployments.
• User Experience – Over the course of the ARM 2.x releases the functionality of the application grew considerably. ARM now has an awesome level of capability. However, with capability can come complexity, and therefore we brought in external design consultants who specialize in streamlining the user interface. As soon as you log in you will notice dramatic improvements: release 3.0 comes with a new workspace, clearer icons, new simpler customizable forms and improved ergonomics.

These improvements will enable your entire organization, at each level, to work more intuitively, ensuring that the application adapts fully to your specific processes. Coupled with performance improvements from the overhaul of the core application using the latest .NET technology, you will find that you are able to work through the application with far greater speed and ease.

Focus

Our on-going agenda is the convergence of Compliance and Enterprise Risk Management. To achieve this, we balance and deliver specific capability that fully supports specialist usage. By doing this we ensure that Active Risk Manager can be deployed in one department or across the enterprise. For example in Project Management we are providing new Gantt charts and Quad displays, whilst for the Operational risk parties we are providing new losses and incident management capabilities.

So what is new and leading edge?

Losses and Incident Management: Active Risk Manager now has the ability to manage and record losses, near misses and incidents. This permits the system to fully close the loop on risk management, to deliver real improvements in projects and operations and to set these losses, near misses and incidents against whether or not the intended improvements have really delivered in terms of reduced losses.

Enabling end-to-end processes: Integration of content management, document management, forum management, and questionnaires means that any risk related process can now be significantly enriched. Through the use of portal technology and services, the process can then be simplified and targeted to specific user groups. For instance, release 3.0, through its ability to integrate, enables business continuity capability within the product to directly access policies, plans and escalation routes - in pre-launch demonstrations this facility was described as "essential and fun to use."

In summary, release 3 furthers our capability to deliver financial benefit, ensure compliance, improve performance, delivery success and overall assured confidence.

Kind Regards,

 Richard Higgs, CEO Strategic Thought Group plc