By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—In the spring of 2003, Patrick Taylor, CEO and president of Oversight Systems, sat with several friends and colleagues at a table in a Starbucks in Atlanta, kicking around ideas for a new entrepreneurial venture. They recognized a problem: companies spend lots of money to keep hackers out of their networks, yet lose much more to internal fraud than to hackers.
Four years ago, Taylor and his colleagues formed Oversight Systems with the idea of looking at business transactions to stop fraud and catch errors. Oversight, which graduates from the Atlanta Technology Development Center May 15, has raised $6.3 million in angel and venture backing and expects to complete a B round in “the near-term,” Taylor tells TechJournal South.
The 44-person company is hiring for most sales roles, in engineering and professional services. The company has already moved from the ATDC incubator into 10,000-square-foot offices. “We outgrew the space limitations they had,” says Taylor, “but the ATDC and whole midtown area is a great environment.”
The company sells continuous auditing software that looks at all transactions going through a business process and inspects 100 percent to detect errors or fraud and help the company resolve the discrepancies.
The software also offers advanced analytics and workflow and extracts data from financial systems including Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft, and customized applications.
“Finding problems is just the first step,” says Taylor. You need a while workflow oriented around how to fix the problems. We also automatically document everything you do in the system. That helps in working with your auditors or for regulatory compliance. You can show you have tested all the transactions and remediated those with issues and document proof of that.”
Taylor says a number of the company’s management team has work in security. His co-founders, who sat around the Starbucks table during the company’s idea stage, include Chris Rossie, VP of business development, Dan Kuokka, CTO, and Skip Addison, VP of product development.
He notes that while the company developed its software to detect fraud, it also finds many errors. “A company actually gets great return on investment just by finding errors. They’re non-compliant transactions as well.”
Oversight sells the software on perpetual license on premises, but most of its nearly 100 customers buy it as Software as a Service. Costs can run from $15,000 for a one time historical analysis to hundreds of thousands for a fullblown implementation.
The firm’s clients are generally fairly large with north of $500 million in revenue with centralized financial functions and include companies as diverse as Pfizer and McDonalds.
Taylor has spoken at several compliance and audit industry conferences from organizations, such as the Institute of Internal Auditors and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. As a respected information security industry insider who served in various product management and strategic marketing roles with Internet Security Systems and Symantec, He is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as RSA, Networld + Interop, Comdex, NetSec and the Goldman Sachs Information Technology Conference.
On the Web: www.oversightsystems.com
© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
