Risk-Management Briefs

EMC announced plans to acquire Legato Systems in a stock transaction valued at $1.3 billion, heating up competition in the data-storage market sector. The potential acquisition will give EMC access to roughly 31,000 existing Legato customers. But according to Yankee Group, EMC faces hard work in figuring out the right mix of products to compete against storage- market leader Veritas as well as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM. With this acquisition, the spotlight is focused on data life-cycle management -- storage-management tools that are designed to manage customer data from the moment it is created to the end of its life cycle, states Yankee Group.

ABN AMRO selected Mantas to provide money-laundering detection software for its global operations. The international bank will roll out the Mantas software via four key centers in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and North America. The bank's North American center has started implementing Mantas' behavior detection software across its wholesale banking operations and it expects the software to go live in its retail, corporate and trust businesses later this year.

The Risk Metrics Group closed its 100th contract for ASP(application-services provider)-based financial risk-management services. RiskMetrics began offering the service in April 2002. The decision to make RiskMetric's analytics service accessible via an ASP Platform was due to increased demand for comprehensive risk management across a wide variety of industries. While initially perceived as a low-cost option for small firms without the need for integration, the vendor contends the ASP platform has now become a full-service, main attraction for larger customers.

Almonde, a Paris-based developer of performance measurement software, is embedding data mining technology from Knowledge extraction Engines (KXEN) in its credit-risk-management platform, Almonde Credit, to help firms comply with Basel II regulations. Almonde claims that financial firms usually lack the product modeling and analytics needed for internal ratings based IRB) approach for Basel II.