Merging for governance and risk

This is something we can expect to see a good deal more of as point solution SaaS providers move to find the natural size and capabilities of what constitutes a `point solution’ from the user’s perspective rather than the service providers. It is that subtle difference of what constitutes a point solution from the consumer’s viewpoint.

Over in the USAVirima Technologies, which delivers SaaS-based IT operations management,  has moved to acquire Aruvio, which has developed a SaaS-based Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution.

Aruvio provides organisations with enterprise scale, easy-to-use GRC tools built and delivered on the  widely used Salesforce.com platform. It provides a complete set of GRC applications, including Compliance Management, Vendor Risk Management, Enterprise Risk Management, Incident Management, and Policy & Training Management.

It offers advanced social collaboration capabilities in addition to easy-to-use process automation features. A key objective for Aruvio has been to make the GRC easy to deploy and use. This is helped by the company offering free trial and pay-as-you-go pricing to reduce the risk for new users.

Virima is adding this GRC service to its own SaaS offering, which has been developed to manage the risks associated with complex IT transformations. This includes datacentre consolidation, optimisation and cloud migration projects.The company’s approach aligns an organisation’s IT operations and assets with its business strategy and processes, enabling greater visibility into its IT ecosystem for audit, compliance and ITIL support functions.

The company claims this leads to IT transformation projects completed faster, and  with significant savings over typical industry approaches.

Virima was founded by serial technology entrepreneur, Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan, who previously co-founded VerticalOne, eLaunchpad LLC and Vigilar Inc. Prior to co-founding Aruvio, Rajesh Unadkat served as the product manager for risk management software company, Agiliance.

“The name Virima stands for 'visual risk management',” Rajan said. “Today, with the Aruvio acquisition and our EcosystemManager SaaS offering, we have a clear path to fulfill that vision. Add to that our unprecedented low price points, and it’s easy to see how SMEs and enterprises alike will benefit by automating spreadsheet-based processes in IT operations and GRC/audit functions.”

“Given Virima’s strong leadership, resources, vision and obvious alignment to Aruvio, it was a natural fit for us to join forces,” Unadkat added. “We built our GRC product from the ground up to support more than 900 compliance regulations, frameworks, and standards on an enterprise class infrastructure to serve customers of all sizes. With seamless integration between regulatory frameworks and internal controls, Aruvio GRC helps avoid redundant control testing with ‘test once, report many’ capability that results in tremendous savings for our customers.”

Aruvio will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Virima. Unadkat, along with co-founder Reddy Rachamallu, will join Virima’s leadership team.