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Pacific Edge Launches New Flagship IT Governance Solution

Industry's First Maturity-Based Approach for Achieving IT Governance Objectives

Pacific Edge Software, recently announced Mariner, its new flagship software that builds on the company's industry-leading portfolio management capabilities by adding robust resource and project management functionality. Mariner is powerful and practical to adopt, and ensures that the benefits of IT governance can be quickly and fully realized. Pacific Edge today also announced Maturity-based Accelerators, bundled software and consulting services that guide organizations through multiple stages of IT governance maturity. Together, the two offerings represent the industry's first maturity-based approach to helping customers deploy IT governance best-practices at their specific levels of readiness.

With portfolio management at its core, Mariner also encompasses robust project, resource, and demand management. Project management capabilities provide a consistent, comprehensive approach for initiating project requests, creating project and task plans, collecting project costs and tracking time, status, and deliverables. Resource management enables the IT organization to analyze resource utilization, skills, and the impact of project changes at the named resource level. Demand management features capture all sources of demand for resources, channel requests through required approval levels, and rapidly mobilize resources.

Designed for rapid adoption at all levels of the organization, Mariner builds on existing Pacific Edge strengths:

-- Mariner supports the development of portfolios without requiring the collection of detailed investment information. This enables organizations to create visibility into the project portfolio in as little as 30 business days. -- Mariner is highly configurable by non-technical resources. An organization's existing workflow and processes can be quickly mirrored in Mariner using its drag-and-drop configurator. -- Mariner's Web-based interface is highly intuitive, role-based and easy to use, which minimizes training time and speeds adoption. -- Mariner's collaboration capabilities, including document management, integrated time sheets and threaded discussions for issues and risks, facilitate better communication and better team decision-making.

"In the past, we have used Pacific Edge to support the successful management of projects and resources in our various project portfolios," said Ernie Nielsen, managing director for Enterprise Project Management, Brigham Young University. "We are excited about the prospect of using Mariner to manage the maintenance and support costs associated with our entire catalog of IT applications and services that is available to our business partners. With the new resource management capability available in Mariner, we have an opportunity to manage 100 percent of our IT activity, capturing project and non-project work and optimizing the use of resources across the complete IT investment lifecycle."

Pacific Edge's new Maturity-based Accelerators dramatically reduce time required for organizations to adopt IT governance practices. Accelerators map to the specific needs of an organization at different stages of process maturity and allow an organization to implement IT governance one stage at a time. Comprised of best-practices, implementation services, proven business processes, preconfigured software, and integrated product/process training, Accelerators reduce implementation risk by sorting capabilities into logical buckets that can be incrementally deployed. Further, they accelerate the benefits of IT governance by leveraging out-of-the-box software capabilities to support a pre-defined set of processes.

"The changes needed to improve IT governance are complex and will have a big impact on IT organizations," said Matt Light, research director at Gartner, Inc. "Taking a staged approach to integrating IT governance practices like portfolio management and cost management usually get measurable results faster, and results will sustain commitment to the long-term goals of the initiative."

Pacific Edge Maturity-based Accelerators are packaged and priced by stage. Organizations that have just begun implementation of an IT governance initiative will benefit from the Stage 1 Accelerator. As processes mature, customers can seamlessly upgrade to later stages to derive further value from their IT governance initiatives.

"Fully implementing IT governance processes is challenging and requires significant changes at many levels of an organization," said Mark Lazar, president and CEO of Pacific Edge Software. "We recognize that while companies adopt and mature their IT governance processes over time, stakeholders need to see results fairly quickly in order for them to continue supporting the initiative. By using a maturity-based, practical implementation approach, we can help customers assess their IT governance maturity and prescribe the proper next steps-helping them navigate the organizational challenges of building an effective IT governance program."

The new Pacific Edge solutions are available immediately. Pricing starts at $75,000 and includes the Stage 1 Maturity-based Accelerator with pre-configured software for 20 users, 20 days of professional services, and one year of maintenance.