“Corporate governance” has become a watchword for public companies worldwide. Laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and BASEL II have been enacted to help restore investor confidence in financial information reported by public companies.

Peregrine should know, after all, it was only a few years ago that its top execs flew the coop in a in a swoop of guilt. Yes, the SEC brought charges of fraud on the company. The San Diego Reader published an interesting story at the time. It covered how a Peregrine VP scoured the moneytrees for nests holding a few firm eggs that could potentially resell the company’s products and then hatched a scheme to count a phoney buy-in of the Peregrine mother nest as actual sales to customers. When it all backfired and the eggs turned rotten, Peregrine bought ‘em up and called it an “acquisition cost.” Ah well, such is business–though not everyone agrees. Now considering the above claim Peregrine makes, (we may want to excuse its history as presumably, like a human being, it has by now shed its old cells and could be all new and perhaps quite honest) it’s a joy to see the company quickly changing flight paths and pulling SOX into an ITAM realm. It continues by saying:

From IT’s perspective, achieving compliance requires implementing strong general controls, such as change management and IT asset management.

IT department, only YOU can prevent C-level theft. No no, it would be taking things too far to convey such a strong message about SOX compliance in relation to the tools that enable it or the people responsible for those tools. But the point’s not bad… ITAM has its place, just like all the other enterprise apps citing their profound effectiveness toward complying with Sarbanes-Oxley.

In other news, HP announced the completion of its acquisition of Peregrine. While the public forgets how Peregrine used to treat its purchases (certainly HP wouldn’t practice that kind of stunt), this will help set HP (via Peregrine Service Center/Asset Center, etc.) to better compete with CA’s Unicenter IT asset management apps.

Our mission is to honor God and serve people by helping businesses achieve excellence.

I believe that is the first time I’ve seen God in a company’s mission statement. I struggle to understand how helping businesses achieve excellence, honour’s God. Of course I’m assuming SouthWare is referring to the Christian God. Seems likely based on the company’s Alabama headquarters–where I’m under the impression the various forms of Christianity are the most predominant religions.

My commentary here has no bearing on whether SouthWare provides a good system or not, nor whether its business practices are good (their site certainly tells everyone how dedicated they are over and over). It’s just the God part I’m picking at. Perhaps they’re able to offer a better service level agreement in the event of Acts of God?

SouthWare flaunts its portability to many platforms, kudos on that, a God-fearing but platform-agnostic application. Or is it? Although SouthWare claims support for a variety of Unixes, Linux, etc. it didn’t list any BSD distribution, I assume the BSD daemon wasn’t the greatest turn-on. On the other hand, they’re supporting SCO Unix, which is just about the same as serving the devil.