Cartesis.

Cartesis has launched Cartesis 10, which it calls "the world's most powerful business performance management (BPM) solution and the first to integrate internal and external financial data for publication, benchmarking and M & A planning."

Through a new partnership with EDGAR[R] Online, Cartesis customers will now be able to pull any eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) data from EDGAR Online's database into a rich, highly integrated performance management suite to perform benchmarking, create key performance indicators (KPIs) and run what-if scenarios.

This newly accessible wealth of external financial data. Cartesis says, will aid planning, budgeting and forecasting, merger and acquisition (M & A) analysis and improve executives' overall understanding of how their companies are positioned.

Cartesis 10 delivers the ability to publish and consume financial information formatted as XBRL, improved processing performance and scalability to help during peak reporting cycles and fully integrated planning and analytics. The new release "integrates the three tiers of financial management, planning and analytics to give companies a clear view of their historical, current and future business performance," the company said in an announcement.

"As closing cycles lengthen because of additional regulatory procedures and requirements, the performance of consolidation software becomes much more important," says Linda Lorenz, vice president and Financial Systems Manager at Citizens Bank. "Cartesis takes advantage of existing infrastructure investments by performing the bulk of consolidation processing on the database level, which speeds up the number-crunching part of closing the books and gives us more time to think strategically about the end results."

The newly-renamed Cartesis 10 suite includes the following products:

* Cartesis Finance, formerly Cartesis Magnitude, helps companies meet new regulatory requirements by further improving financial consolidation, Sarbanes-Oxley document management integration with Resources Global Professionals Policy IQ and management reporting functionalities;

* Cartesis Planning, formerly Cartesis ES Planning, includes user-driven operational modeling to support decentralized planning; and

* Cartesis Analytics, formerly Cartesis ES Information Delivery, provides deeper financial intelligence, reporting and analysis functionalities along with the ability to distribute role-based reports throughout the enterprise.

The relationship with EDGAR "will allow customers to take inwardly-focused financial management data and make it more external," said Trevor Walker, vice president of product marketing for Cartesis, in an interview. "It allows companies to see how they stack up against competitors and do side-by-side reporting."

Customers can tap into the EDGAR Online data on the Web and sweep that into an integrated data model, Walker says. The resulting "persistency of data" allows companies to better determine historical growth trends, KPIs and other measures, and "those can be drivers out into the Cartesis planning product," he adds.

Web: www.cartesis.com