Xactium Opens New Markets with Cloud-Based GRC on Force.com

Today’s businesses are confronted by an environment of growing regulation and surveillance. For most companies, this means increased costs, increased infrastructure, and increased headaches. For Xactium it means new opportunities. Xactium developed the first true cloud-computing GRC solution, bringing cloud computing to the enterprise.

UK-based Xactium delivers GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) solutions to some of the most demanding industries in the world, particularly to the financial services and insurance sectors but also for businesses in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, government, utilities, chemicals, petrochemicals, automotive, and food and beverage. Each of these industries has its own unique needs, and within each one GRC must also address the requirements of a variety of different types of users – including compliance managers, executives, senior management, risk and policy managers, and more—making globalization, interoperability, and training all key issues in development.

Finding Force.com

When company managers wanted to find a way to compete more effectively in this challenging and crowded marketplace, they looked skyward. Xactium sought to compete by developing new applications more quickly, and finding faster ways to modify applications to suit clients’ individual needs. The company needed to ensure interoperability and global support while providing customized solutions and shortening its development cycles. For Xactium managers, salesforce.com’s Force.com platform was a no-brainer.  Having already run Force.com apps such as Salesforce CRM for more than a year, Executives decided to try their hand at building their own products in the cloud.  The results have been compelling.

According to Andy Evans, CEO and managing director at Xactium, “We were pretty amazed by Force.com’s flexibility and the speed with which we could develop new apps. Many companies have to manage GRC in a way that is specific to their business processes – Force.com makes it easy for us to quickly give them the unique solutions they need.”

Force.com Benefits

Prior to using Force.com, Xactium built GRC solutions with Java and Eclipse. Not only was development a lengthy process, with many steps between gathering business requirements and finalizing a solution; tailoring the products to meet the specific needs of individual customers was time consuming. Xactium’s experience with Force was completely different. It took the company just 6 months to develop its first Force.com-based GRC suite, which includes apps for risk management, policy management and compliance reporting (case management) . Evans estimates that it would have taken three or four times longer to build the application on another platform.

Xactium also benefits by not having to assemble and manage an infrastructure to support its products. “Building on Force.com means we don’t have to buy and maintain a bunch of servers in the back room,” says Evans, “This means we’re saving about 60 to 70% of what our total costs would be.” Cost savings are not the only benefit of the cloud-computing model. As Evans points out, “Because we don’t have to spend time thinking about the architecture and maintaining the infrastructure, we can really focus on the business problems.”

In fact, Force.com is so flexible and easy to customize that Xactium can demonstrate actual solutions to business issues as part of the RFP process. According to Evans, “We recently submitted a bid to a customer that wanted some very specific customizations. Rather than just assuring them that we could do the work, we were able to do the actual changes in a couple of days and show the customer the final work as part of the bidding process. That kind of competitive edge gives us a real advantage.”

Xactium also gains from the Force.com ecosystem. Not only does the company distribute its GRC products via AppExchange, but it easily adds additional tools to its own solution – including survey management, time management, and more – providing added functionality without added development time.

Customers Love Force.com-Based GRC

MF Global, a world leader in financial services, was one of the first customers of Xactium’s new GRC solution. MF Global’s compliance and legal team is driven by both regulatory requirements and the needs of an agile global business. The company was attracted by the fast track, flexible work flow tools of the Xactium solution. According to Richard Seaman, MF Global’s director of compliance and legal, “In Xactium GRC we found a robust management tool to define and manage new applications to help deliver key regulatory initiatives to our business agenda. Customization of the solution has been a big advantage for us. The understanding of the business issues by the Xactium team has also proved a valuable resource. The result is we have been able to make changes, introduce new requirements, and deliver everything in days not months.”

Force for the Future

Xactium executives are so pleased with Force.com that they have discontinued their development efforts on other platforms. The management team is also talking about expanding the company’s enterprise efforts with Force.com. According to Evans, “CRM accounts for just 10% of the enterprise ‘software’ market. We’re already moving into the other 90% with our GRC products. There’s a big opportunity to take more of that 90% into the cloud, and with the Force.com platform we can compete effectively against much larger ISVs, for larger accounts. For example, we are working with an HR consultancy on a Force.com HR governance and management app. The Force.com platform is the secret to our success.”

How do I get started?

The best way to get started is to sign up for the Force.com Free Edition.