Operations Newsflashes: JPMorgan Kills the Horizon Tool, and more

JPMorgan Dumps Horizon, Chase Cooper Offers Help

JPMorgan has elected to halt support for its Horizon product, a Web-based tool for managing operation risk. Client support for international users of Horizon will end in mid-2006.

Chase Cooper, a supplier of operational risk and compliance business solutions for Basel II, has announced the launch of a Horizon Migration Model for existing users of JPMorgan's Horizon operational risk software to migrate to its Accelerate software suite.

"There are numerous Horizon users in the marketplace who will have difficult decisions to face," said Zag Asghar, director of Chase Cooper, in a release. "Some users may continue with Horizon for a period of time, but ultimately they will need to consider the functionality necessary for more effective operational risk management not catered for by JP Morgan's product." Chase Cooper believes that JPMorgan's decision to pull out of the Basel II Operational Risk market was underpinned by its need to focus on its core financial business activities.

Protegrity Acquires Data Security Provider OmniSecure

Protegrity Corp., has acquired OmniSecure, a privately held data security company based in Santa Clara, California. Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Founded in 2000, OmniSecure, which holds a key patent on file-level encryption, provides transparent encryption products to protect sensitive data in files, wherever they reside, including servers, backup tapes and storage systems. The company's core product is VDisk, a file protection solution at the kernel level, which provides for transparency and speed without requiring changes to existing applications.

The acquisition of OmniSecure comes seven months after Protegrity acquired Kavado, an application security vendor. OmniSecure's products will augment Protegrity's recent release of the Defiance 4.0 Security Software suite, adding an additional level of security that will integrate into a common policy, management console and reporting.

"Recent, highly public mishaps point to the need for organizations to more effectively protect sensitive business, employee, partner, customer, and intelligence data. The integration of OmniSecure's products into Defiance 4.0 gives CIOs, CSOs and CTOs the opportunity to purchase solutions with the confidence that they're getting a vendor that can significantly strengthen their data security and truly meet their needs, " said Jon Oltski, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, in a release.

As part of the acquisition, Protegrity declared that there will be no layoffs or office closings. Instead, the company is expanding its global footprint with OmniSecure's 20 employees and offices in Santa Clara, Calif., and China.

FSTC Forms Enterprise Architecture Standing Committee The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) has created a new standing committee whose mission is to focus on enterprise architecture issues that affect the entire spectrum of the financial services industry. William Barr, a seasoned executive with over 30 years of experience developing technology solutions for financial institutions and other Fortune 500 companies, has been named managing executive of this committee.

"Financial services organizations today all face the same technology challenges relating to enterprise architecture," said Dan Schutzer, executive director of FSTC. "The formation of this new standing committee is already generating considerable interest from both the institutions themselves and technology vendors of all types."

FSTC's Enterprise Architecture Standing Committee is a forum and vehicle to address common architecture issues as an industry-wide community rather than in a vacuum. Senior enterprise architects, technologists, financial-institution executives, and FSTC-member technology companies will network and collaborate around issues and best practices, learn through teleconferences and workshops, and conduct research projects.

GAIM Advisors Selects Riskdata's FOFiX for Risk Budgeting

Fund of hedge funds manager GAIM Advisors has implemented Riskdata's FOFiX product as the foundation of its risk management process. GAIM Advisors is part of Integrated Asset Management Group, which has over $700 million in assets under management and offers three main funds of hedge funds.

"FOFiX supports our highly-structured investment process. It gives us a quantitative understanding of the contribution of each manager to our global risk profile, both in terms of marginal value at risk as well as by highlighting the systemic risks - i.e., the most adverse market scenarios— and the managers who are contributing to this," said Dawn Kendall, investment manager at GAIM Advisors, in a release.

FOFiX is a forward-looking risk management platform specifically designed to meet the needs of hedge fund investors. It offers a daily updated view on all market classes— equities, fixed-income, listed and OTC derivatives— giving fund of fund managers interactive and intuitive access to any risk analysis.