Operational Resilience Tooling Panorama 2021

Following our first Operational Resilience Tooling Panorama last year, we are proud to present the 2021 edition. Building on the comprehensive range of organisations, we have developed and deepened our view of the tooling landscape for our clients and the wider market. Despite the significant increase in regulation and market forces leading to a big operational resilience focus in companies, many are still not familiar with these software solutions that enable the adoption of a resilience programme. Our selection includes both start-ups and big players, regardless of their location in the world, with around a quarter of tools being developed by small businesses.

This year, we have included 193 companies offering tooling across 14 categories that span the full breadth and timeline of operational resilience, from identification and planning, to detection and response, to recovery and testing. In comparison to last year, we have 23 new logos added to the panorama. It is very revealing and points towards to the drivers in the market that 10 of these were in our Emergency Notification category and 5 were in Risk Management. The market has consolidated through M&A activity, with Assurance, Avalution, ClearView and BC Management merging to form Castellan, and Juvare and Everbridge acquiring LiveProcess and NC4 respectively.

To give greater context to the latest trends described above, we have extracted a sub-set of the overall tooling panorama to produce a start-up radar. There are 43 start-ups in the radar spanning all categories but Technology Resilience. The most highly populated category, in line with the findings around new logos, was Emergency Notification. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations now find it critical to be able to reach all their employees at once for mass communications (e.g., sanitary measures) or in separate groups (e.g., specific remote working guidelines). The market has responded, by either developing a new product to complement a Business Continuity Management / Operational Resilience offer or as a standalone tool designed by new actors in this sector.

As part of the radar, we have selected 3 start-ups to highlight:

• Kinetic Global offers a Business Continuity Platform based on predictive threats analytics. Their messaging tool enables organisations the ability to contact people automatically within a threat radius and send useful details to emergency teams if necessary.
• Crisis Care provides an all-app Business Continuity and Crisis Management service. It is possible to contact all your employees or smaller predefined groups of collaborators directly from a mobile phone with a few touches.
• Swift Reach has 2 tools dedicated to emergency alerting, with their core product allowing a wide group of people to be contacted rapidly to inform them about an unforeseen emergency situation (weather event, building fire, life threatening situation, etc.).

To conclude, our analysis demonstrates that innovation is mostly driven by the digitalisation of legacy resilience topics such as continuity planning and testing, crisis response and risk management. We also see that workforce resilience, reputation management and incident detection are topics leveraging mature AI and big data technologies to push automation a step further. The market is currently in a state of rapid growth and it is very exciting to see organisations’ key requirements being delivered with greater precision and to see those core offerings being complemented by a range of capabilities enabled by clever technological application.