Stamford, Conn., September 14, 2009 – MEGA, a major governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions provider, has been placed in the visionaries quadrant in two Gartner, Inc. reports: “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms” and “Magic Quadrant for Operational Risk Management Software for Financial Services”.

The two reports contain an analysis of software vendors that serve these markets. Vendors are positioned in the reports in one of four categories: niche players, challengers, leaders, and visionaries.

“Gartner conducts a comprehensive and thorough review of EGRC and ORM solutions,” noted Lucio de Risi, CEO of MEGA International. “We believe MEGA’s position in the visionaries quadrant in both reports is a testimony to the value our software delivers to our customers.”

Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance Platforms (EGRC)
“The EGRC platform market derives from the need for many entities to improve the oversight of corporate governance – including financial reporting compliance, enterprise risk management and related audits,” noted the report on EGRC. “Therefore, an EGRC platform must solve immediate GRCM needs associated with corporate governance and also enable an enterprise to pursue future consolidation and integration of GRC activities.”

Gartner placed companies in the visionaries’ quadrant if they had “a solid understanding of the market, as demonstrated by domain expertise and responsiveness to customer expectations. They are actively executing against an aggressive product road map that expands support to additional regulatory and nonregulatory compliance and risk management needs.”

MEGA provides flexible EGRC solutions for all four key areas covered in the report (audit, compliance, risk, and policy management). It seamlessly integrates GRC with BPA to map business processes within the organization against risks and controls, facilitating process and performance improvements, and offers comprehensive audit planning features. The software is unique in its recognition of the overlap in audit, risk, and control activities; it provides a common platform through a global repository to centralize and coordinate all data relating to these areas in a single searchable environment that can be shared between departments, divisions, work groups, or committees.

Operational Risk Management (ORM)
“The use of ORM software by financial services firms requires capabilities beyond generic audit, control and compliance applications. In addition to qualitative self assessment capabilities, leading institutions are seeking solutions that support quantitative, performance-based models,” the August 28, 2009 report on ORM noted.

Gartner reported that 40 vendors claimed to have ORM solutions. To be included in the report, an offering had to be stand-alone software for control of operational risk and meet several criteria:

Gartner placed companies like MEGA in the ORM Magic Quadrant only if their products demonstrated:

• “Enterprise reach (as opposed to just departmental or line-of-business capabilities);
• Complete capital calculation functionality including statistical and scenario analysis, stress testing and simulation;
• Risk and performance data/indicator monitoring, assessment, and integration;
• Risk management, escalation and alerting functionality for early warnings and loss events;
• Broad spectrum reporting (including, for example, loss events) for senior managers, boards of directors and auditors, as well as bank examiners;
• Assessment and integration of qualitative and quantitative metrics and management controls;
• Business process identification, mapping and evaluation;
• Risk policy definition and controls, including organizational framework;
• Audit and certification;
• Data management functionality that incorporates or allows for the integration of a risk data repository, risk metadata library, performance data repository, risk rule engine, ETL, and multitype loss data collection, storage, and retrieval."

MEGA supports advanced measurement for ORM, with a risk framework that includes Basel II and Sarbanes Oxley preloaded libraries. With the company’s pioneering foundation in business process analysis, the MEGA software solutions for ORM supports business process mapping to provide a unique level of visibility into enterprise organization and processes, operational risks and controls. In addition, product features include risk and control self assessment, loss data collection, and Key Risk Indicator (KRI) capabilities, as well as a calculation engine, scenario analysis, quantitative analytics, and Bayesian integration.

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrants are copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc. and are reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.