The PPM Team – ASIS Security Expo 2013 in Chicago, IL.
PPM: A World Leader in Corporate Security Continues to Innovate
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By Mark Kandborg
et me introduce you to PPM, an Edmonton-based software company that develops, maintains and delivers leading edge corporate security software to clients around the world, including social media giants, diamond mines, and famous cultural landmarks. PPM was established 25 years ago by Denis O’Sullivan, a former detective with the Irish police force who was, at the time, a corporate security advisor for the City of Edmonton. Her father’s background in law enforcement was a good fit, as company president and co-CEO Elaine O’Sullivan explains. “Think of a corporate security department as somewhat like a police department. They are responsible for protecting their organization’s assets, including their people, property and information. In essence, they are responsible for preventing incidents, and that’s everything from the most common, like laptop theft, fraud, and workplace violence, to those that make headlines like a teenager stowing away in a wheel well of an airplane, a terrorist act or the theft of credit card records from a retailer.” The consequences of any incident can be great and include direct financial loss, work disruption and litigation. The obvious objective is to prevent incidents, but how? Much of the solution lies in PPM’s specialty: the effective documentation, analysis and investigation of incidents. Back in the mid-’80s, dealing with hundreds and thousands of incident records was an almost overwhelming task.
“In much the same way as you might envision a police station back in the day with rows upon rows of filing cabinets full of incident reports, in corporate security it really was just paper records. It was challenging to answer quick questions, next to impossible to identify trends and annual reports took weeks to prepare,” O’Sullivan explains. The founders of PPM saw a need to take that information, put it into a computer and make it accessible. They dubbed their software “the new intelligence” and it was to change the face of corporate security forever. Today, PPM is a world leader in what they do and has successfully transitioned their software from DOS to Windows, from a bleeding edge solution to a mission critical tool and from local installations to the cloud. By enabling the effective documentation, analysis, and reporting of security events, their clients make informed decisions that prevent incidents, protect assets, and mitigate risk, O’Sullivan says. “Incidents happen. An employee is being threatened by a colleague, or an employee at a remote location has activated a panic alarm. Maybe a competitor has gained access to proprietary company research, or the CEOs office door was left unlocked and his laptop is missing. Accusations of negligence or of inadequate security are countered by documented evidence and the deployment of effective security safeguards is facilitated by statistics that demonstrate what’s needed — and where.” Historically a reporting and analytical tool, PPM’s latest solu-
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