Green Status Pro automates compliance management solutions, adds performance and lowers costs with SoftLayer
Published January 14, 2014
A growing startup, Green Status Pro’s mission is to simplify the regulatory lives of operations managers. To do this, the company sought the best platform to deliver its software as a service offering.
Delivering its solutions via the cloud is ideal, as cloud computing provides Green Status Pro the functionality and price advantages to automate compliance procedures that were previously performed manually. After researching cloud-application hosting providers, Green Status Pro ultimately chose SoftLayer.
“Regulations and standards are a growth industry... most business regulations include oversight and reviews that require the documentation of due diligence. What we do is facilitate the automation of the documentation of due diligence,” explains Robert Kasameyer, President of Green Status Pro. “We rely heavily on the cloud to deliver the advanced functionality our customers must have at a price that provides them with a significant savings over alternative approaches. That’s why we selected SoftLayer, and it’s working well.”
The Massachusetts-based company caters to the millions of organizations worldwide that need to comply with government regulations and industry standards, such as the Dodd-Frank Conflict Minerals Rule, environmental regulations, and ISO 9001 Quality Management Standards.
- Company Name: Green Status Pro
- Headquarters: Woburn, Mass.
- Industry: Regulatory Compliance Management
- Founded: 2013
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Website: http://www.greenstatuspro.com/
Company Details:
Green Status Pro (GSP) delivers the leading management application for administering and documenting conformance with industry standards and government regulations efficiently. GSP’s cloud-based software service provides a comprehensive platform for automating burdensome but business-critical due diligence. Blending leading-edge technology with uniform best-business processes, GSP is minimizing their customers’ regulatory risks.
IBM solutions:
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Companies must not only document their practices, but also be able to prove they are following them. These compliance records need to be documented in writing, a task that typically falls on operating managers, to whom this is an administrative overhead task that takes time away from their operating job, explains John Logan, Founder of Green Status Pro.
“These tasks are typically not supported by the IT department, because they are instruction-oriented,” Logan adds. “It’s not something that is easy to program. Operating managers need the capability to document the proof that they are maintaining compliance on an on-going basis throughout their organization.”
"We rely heavily on the cloud to deliver the advanced functionality our customers must have at a price that provides them with a significant savings over alternative approaches. That’s why we selected SoftLayer."
Robert Kasameyer, President at Green Status Pro
Documenting compliance is a requirement to be in businesses today, even though it does not directly increase profitability. Traditionally done manually, proving due diligence is a tedious effort that requires lots of paper and Excel sheets, as well as the final gathering and consolidating of all the data into a single report to give to auditors, Logan continues.
Reports may be audited every year by organizations such as government examiners, a company’s own internal audit department, independent accounting firms, and self-regulatory trade associations.
“Managing compliance effectively and efficiently is business critical because you can lose customers if you fail to meet the rules and regulations they expect and require you to be in conformance with,” says Logan, adding that in order to be deemed a quality supplier by the public, it’s critical companies put in place the due diligence processes to prove they have done what they said they would.
Green Status Pro’s mission is to assist operating mangers to document, delegate and track progress from year to year, by automating the process.
“This is, in many ways, the least sexy business that you can possibly imagine,” says Kasameyer. “It’s a compliance business at the end of the day. But it’s a critically important one.”
A growing market necessitates automation
And Green Status Pro’s market is growing around the world, and the demand for automation is increasing. “There are many regulations and standards that come out every day,” says Kasameyer.
In starting the company, the main focus was automating compliance processes for the industry segment with the greatest regulatory burden—manufacturing. “When we surveyed manufacturers, we found they were facing the challenge of managing what's known as the conflict minerals regulations,” says Logan. Regulated by the SEC, the Conflict Minerals Rule requires that companies trace and report the use of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold—known as 3TG—throughout their supply chain. The goal is to eliminate the sourcing of these metals from the warlord-ruled Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or adjoining countries.
The Conflict Minerals Rule regulations, created by the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, Section 1502, directly affect 6,000 public companies in the U.S., as well as their approximately 200,000 private and off-shore suppliers. They stipulate that any company with these minerals in their products has to identify the source smelters and be able to prove it is not knowingly funding the violence at the hands of armed groups in the DRC. In addition under the SEC requirements, companies have to follow an internationally accepted framework for putting in place due diligence processes, and compliance with these processes must be documented every year.
The SEC’s conflict minerals management procedures and reporting requirements are not enforced by fines, explains Kasameyer. Companies that use 3TG must publicly disclose in a Conflict Minerals Report the due diligence procedures they have put in place to minimize the possibility that they are sourcing these minerals from mines controlled by armed groups in the DRC area.
“It’s not a requirement to stop sourcing from the DRC itself. Companies are encouraged to use smelters in the region that are certified by an independent audit to use only minerals from mines that are not controlled by armed groups. There is a requirement to measure year-over-year improvements in a company’s conflict minerals reporting program,” explains Kasameyer. “By requiring companies to post their Conflict Minerals Report, the SEC is using the court of public opinion to enforce compliance with its conflict minerals rules.”
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“Green Status Pro uniquely simplifies the challenges of showing compliance with a wide range of regulations and standards by deploying a standard, automated review process,” says Logan, adding that the conflict minerals rule is the biggest issue for manufacturers today. Large companies with thousands of suppliers are receiving conflict minerals reports from each, many listing 20-40 smelters. “In the first stage of the process, Green Status Pro’s software reads the reports and makes sure they are valid. We have rules that checks for mistakes.”
Green Status Pro also provides the capability to document communications back and forth with each supplier. All these communications can be memorialized in a form that provides the basis and back-up for an auditable supplier due diligence report. All this needs to be done adequately and at the lowest cost possible, explains Kasameyer.
Choosing SoftLayer over Amazon
“When we started the company, we knew we had to put our applications in the cloud,” says Logan, explaining that moving to a public cloud was the best option for them in order to be able to quickly leverage emerging best-in-class technologies. If Green Status Pro had chosen to build its own hosting capabilities, it would have lost over time the cost and technology advantages of being in the cloud.
The first priority in choosing a public cloud platform was to team up with a hosting provider that would best meet their customers’ requirements. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the initial vendor Green Status Pro investigated because it’s large and well marketed, explains Logan. However, as they investigated, they found their manufacturing market was not convinced that AWS was the right solution. While agreeing that AWS was driving down the price of cloud computing, executives and senior IT managers cited several well-reported systems crashes, doubts about Amazon’s long-term commitment to this side business, as well as security and transparency concerns. Furthermore, due to AWS’s proprietary architecture, Green Status Pro felt it would take many months to get the system up and running—unless they hired an AWS specialist to assist.
"There is one thing we know around the world, that people trust that IBM will be in the IT business for the long term."
John Logan, Founder of Green Status Pro
Logan adds that security in the cloud was the number one concern of their customers. So Green Status Pro next decided to test AWS on a developer micro system, but, as Kasameyer explains, the proprietary nature of AWS made this a difficult task. This problem was compounded by the AWS support personnel being trained to be more sales-oriented rather than focused on supporting the project.
“We went to IBM, which we had been working with as a business partner,” explains Logan. “There is one thing we know around the world, that people trust that IBM will be in the IT business for the long term.”
At that time, IBM had yet to acquire SoftLayer. The initial pitch of offerings from IBM wasn’t what they were looking for at Green Status Pro, but a week later, Logan received a call with the news IBM had purchased SoftLayer.
“They had something called a bare metal option, where you can get the machine and load it with your own database and operating environment,” says Logan.
The second selling point was the security architecture, with such features as three pipes into the servers to ensure they are properly monitored. The third was a pod-structured data center that provides uniform services in a secure environment globally.
In addition, IBM decided to also invest in Green Status Pro’s success by offering membership in SoftLayer’s Catalyst program. which provides support services for new companies. IBM believes Green Status Pro will capture a high volume of new compliance customers around the world for SoftLayer.
“The turnaround really came when we worked with their people,” says Logan. “Their support people are entrepreneurial, engineering … they understood us, they understood what our technical people needed. They are totally technically competent, and they got that system up and running for us—transformed off our servers we had been running on … in just four weeks.”
SoftLayer delivers swift start up and test drive function
Together with SoftLayer, Green Status Pro has a multi-tiered approach to security—which starts with an ID and password-protected application server, which is constantly monitored, and also includes security between the application and the database, physical security of the buildings, as well as communications security for monitoring the machines.
"Start-up time is everything, so being able to get this application up to speed very quickly was very important.”
John Logan, Founder of Green Status
IBM announced the acquisition of SoftLayer in July 2013, and Green Status Pro was up and running with the application in mid-August. “The SoftLayer people are dedicated,” says Logan, adding that the initial call was on a Wednesday and papers were being signed that Saturday.
Green Status Pro moved all their applications to SoftLayer’s servers, including their application development servers, their production servers, and their marketing servers.
“Start-up time is everything,” explains Logan of SoftLayer’s response time, “so being able to get this application up to speed very quickly was very important.”
Logan adds that aside from the SoftLayer team, Green Status Pro didn’t have to bring in any other expertise, and they have received zero complaints from the company’s chief technology officer.
“It’s worked well. We are very happy with the service,” says Logan, explaining that SoftLayer is also responsive to Green Status Pro’s potential customers who want to talk to SoftLayer directly.
SoftLayer also has the capability to allow Green Status Pro to offer new clients a test drive, where they can load their own data directly on the SoftLayer platform and see for themselves how easily, quickly, and seamlessly the process is.
“That’s been a wonderful sales tool for us,” explains Kasameyer. “We couldn’t be happier.”
Before moving to the cloud, Green Status Pro housed two physical servers. With SoftLayer, the company is operating eight virtual servers, with added performance and security, at a lower cost.
“And it frees us to do what strategically is critical for us. Acquiring and managing servers is not strategic for us,” explains Kasameyer, adding that the large amount of advertising and press surrounding the SoftLayer acquisition has only helped in their sales pitch to prospective clients as well as their faith in the platform. “We made strategic assumptions that IBM was going to invest heavily in this area. We believe it when we hear the numbers that this is going to be a $17 billion business going forward.”
Listen to a short podcast with Robert Kasameyer for more on this project.