EDM solution vendor PaceMetrics has this month signed a non-exclusive partnership agreement with business process management (BPM) solution vendor Nimbus to tie the former’s PaceMaker solution to the latter’s Nimbus Control solution. Gerry Giblin, CEO of PaceMetrics, explains that the two vendors have been working together over the last six months to develop the partnership, which is aimed at offering increased operational control to firms’ middle and back office functions, including trade settlement and regulatory reporting.
“We chose Nimbus as their products are complementary to ours in offering a comprehensive client solution to BPM – their focus on discovery, documentation and definition of process feeds directly into our real-time monitoring and exception management capabilities,” explains Giblin. “In combination, clients benefit from overlapping skill sets in understanding the business needs and applying technology to manage and streamline it.”
By this logic, the vendors claim customers benefit from the process clarity delivered by Nimbus Control combined with the real-time delivery of transactional information by PaceMaker, to offer increased visibility and control of critical business operations. The combined offering aims to optimise operational processes and address a number of related pressures facing financial institutions such as increasing trade volumes, declining margins, operational cost pressures, regulatory demands for process transparency and diverse client demands.
Giblin continues: “The complementary nature of our products means that we can each offer additional capabilities to our existing customers – bringing together the discipline and best practices of process discovery with real-time monitoring technology to ensure the defined processes are adhered to and exceptions are managed expeditiously.”
In terms of integration between the two solutions, he indicates that the process has been fairly straightforward due to the loosely coupled architectures employed by both companies. Extensive use of XML data formats in both sets of products means that information is easily shared, he adds.
“By working together we offer clients a more complete solution to performance improvement – Nimbus Control helps clients capture or discover their business processes and strengthens their ability to manage that knowledge and improve the processes in a governed way, whereas PaceMaker enables the clients to layer relevant performance metrics and business control metrics on top of this process view. You can see therefore how the two capabilities fit side by side. If you’re looking to improve business performance you need a combined view of how you intend to operate (your processes) as well as how you are actually performing (the metrics). The two together provide greater understanding of where to focus performance improvement efforts, and that’s what we mean by increased transparency,” elaborates Giblin.
The tie up is therefore aimed at boosting the EDM vendor’s competitive positioning in the market, with its extension further into the downstream processing environment at a time when cost and risk reduction are primary focuses within its client community. PaceMetrics has also been championing its lean EDM model approach for the last year or so, with a view to focusing on downstream consuming systems rather than building a monolithic centralised data management platform. The last publicly announced implementation for the vendor was with ABN Amro mid-last year.
As for Nimbus, the vendor has been heavily focused on the risk and compliance data management challenges of the current market environment over the last year or so. It has a number of partnership agreements under its belt in addition to this one, including one with Quadrant Risk Management, which it signed early last year. Nimbus originally set out to offer solutions based on ISO standards, but the vendor has since extended its ambitions to the wider area of business process transformation and has netted around 65 financial services clients, including HSBC, JPMorgan and Barclays Capital.
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