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What is Basel II ? By the end of 2006 the Basel II Accords will enter into effect. These accords apply to financial institutions and their objective is to cover three types of risk: - Credit risk, - Market risk, - Operational risk.

From an IT perspective : In the context of an information system, it is clearly operational risk management that counts.
This is defined as "the risk of direct or indirect losses resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events".

Following the Basel II accords, operational risk management should take into account capital coverage of these risks.
However, providing proof of better internal control over these risks can directly free up a part of the capital payable by default.
Thus visible control of the information system will undoubtedly be one of the major factors in reducing the amount of capital immobilized.

This makes procedures and organisational tools for tracking enhancements to the information system, application cross-referencing and documentation into strategic aspects of company management - particularly since their cost is often insignificant in comparison with the capital they can free up.

As the Basel II regulatory deadlines come closer, information system enhancement projects are multiplying. Furthermore, because most financial organisations have based all or part of their information system on dedicated software packages, they depend on information that is often difficult to retrieve from suppliers.

Once again, the ARCAD solutions come to the fore not only as guarantors of a rigorous and controlled organisation of IT, but also as a means of reducing reliance on suppliers, and moreover, of freeing capital for business use.

To find out more about the iSeries Developer Roadmap click here

UNDERSTAND THE ROLE OF THE ARCAD SOFTWARE TOOLS IN SARBANES-OXLEY COMPLIANCE: In July 2002, Georges Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that he himself declared as "the most advanced reform in the business world since the times of Franklin Delano Roosevelt".This new law accentuates company responsibility in the publication of financial results in order to combat fraud on the lines of Enron, Worldcom ...

What are the stakes involved in this enforced compliance ?
Today, audit agencies are seeing the stakes involved for affected companies and the sheer effort involved in becoming compliant.
Certain agencies estimate that 30% of companies have already invested over 50% more than their estimated compliance budget.

This is not just a "one off” project: company processes have changed and compliance has become a continuous process in the same way as quality certification did. Daily tasks at all levels of the workplace are affected in some way.

One of the many challenges involved is that although the legislators stipulated that compliance was mandatory they did not present a detailed method for information systems.
The law does not impose the use of tools but that would seem a logical conclusion.
This becomes more and more obvious as you examine the COBIT reference document for SOX compliance in some detail.

ARCAD tools: real added value in guaranteeing SOX compliance.
Whereas most software vendors have chosen to release a SOX-ready version to benefit from these new market opportunities, we have not needed to modify our tools to adapt to these constraints. Rather, it is the new constraints that have emphasized the existing functionality of the ARCAD tools.

A good example comes from one of our customers who recently attributed his successful compliance to the ARCAD range. ARCAD served as the foundation for a set of specific control processes and eased his task prior to and during the audit itself.
Read more detail as to how our tools bring real added value:(repository, software configuration management, traceability, documentation, tests, tracing of modification requests ...). more

Indeed, we have carefully measured our offer against the 318 detailed COBIT control points.

Results summary:
- our tools bring added value in 80 % of the control points,
- for certain points our tools are classed as indispensable,
- overall they play a key role in the audit phase (by supplying the information required by the auditor) and in particular in the "control maturity" index (from 0 Nonexistent to 5 Optimized) as a "key success factor".

This opens up new horizons for our tools that will continue to benefit from the SOX effect: either through companies seeking to reduce the overall cost of SOX (increased automation via tools) or from those looking for "maturity" gains.

HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME FOR OUR PARTICIPATION IN THE COMMON ORLANDO THIS FALL:

Our presence at the Common ORLANDO from 18th to the 22nd September at the Orlando World Center Marriott Resort and Convention Center proved both a commercial and strategic success, serving to strengthen our relationship and alignment with IBM. Clearly the iSeries software market is highly dynamic and in a period of major change. Principal needs lay in the ALM ( Application Lifecycle Management ) market and particularly in multi-platform development, coinciding with our Eclipse PlugIns and software management solutions around a common multi-platform repository.

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