Cartesis Upgrade Targets Governance, Operations, ConsolidationCartesis Upgrade Targets Governance, Operations, Consolidation

Focusing on providing integrated functionality rather than a collection of stovepipe applications, Cartesis has introduced Release 2 of its Cartesis 10 performance management suite with enhanced governance, workforce planning and financial close capabilities.

Improving financial governance, risk and compliance controls, Release 2 unifies Cartesis Governance with the Cartesis 10 suite to provide a single framework for all risk and control processes. "Cartesis has recognized the integration points of financial consolidation and reporting with compliance and internal controls management," states analyst Kathleen Wilhide of IDC. The payoff, she predicts, will be "reliability, efficiency and, ultimately, cost benefits" because you won't have to work in two separate environments and you'll know how the figures you're using got there.

Cartesis Workforce Planning supporting a critical operational area for big employers, providing complete salary, tax and benefits expense calculations so firms can understand how incremental changes and compensation planning impacts staff cost. The planning model lets you drill down to the individual employee level and perform date-driven analyses.

The old adage on consolidation is that a fast close is a quality close, yet compliance-related scrutiny has added an average of seven days to closing cycles over the past few years, according to Cartesis. To help reclaim that lost time, the Release 2 upgrade of Cartesis Finance offers new functionality including incremental consolidation, whereby only information that has changed is recalculated rather than the entire database. What's more, Cartesis Finance does its processing in the database rather than on the application server, a patented approach said to offer significant performance improvements.

Cartesis 10 was introduced in early May at the vendor's North American user group meeting. Cartesis has more than 1,300 corporate customers, and it recently agreed to be acquired by Business Objects in a $300 million acquisition expected to close by July.