Collaborative Software Initiative Elects Former Head of Global Infrastructure for Credit Suisse to Advisory Council

Nels V. Marin to provide strategic direction for financial sector initiatives.

Salem-News.com Business Report

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), the company that brings like-minded organizations together to work on collaborative software at a fraction of the cost, today announced that Nels V. Marin has been named to CSI's Advisory Council.

Based in New York City, Mr. Marin will be responsible for strategy and business development for CSI's financial sector activities.

Mr. Marin most recently directed strategy for the North American Infrastructure Group at Citigroup. He also served as Global Head of Infrastructure for Barclays Capital where he focused on improving the performance, reliability and availability of global production systems. Mr. Marin served as Managing Director and Head of Global Infrastructure for Credit Suisse for 16 years.

"CSI has responded to the requests of wall street banks who wanted to collaborate on certain compliance projects," said Stuart Cohen, CEO. "This sector has become an important focus for the company. We wanted to add someone to the Advisory Council who was strategic and technical as well as knowledgeable about the compliance and regulatory challenges the financial industry faces. Nels has a strong background in strategic development, process improvement, and implementation of service delivery IT systems."

"CSI's collaborative model delivers many opportunities for me to apply my specific expertise in meeting global regulatory and compliance requirements," Marin said.

"Our model is a high value critical component of the financial services business solution that CSI brings to bear in a practical yet innovative way across the industry."

CSI is a member of the Financial Institution Shared Assessments Program (bitsinfo.org/fisap) created by BITS, a non-profit industry consortium made up of 100 of the largest financial institutions in the United States.

CSI has allowed financial institutions to make vendor data more readily available through a web services front-end application for collection and editing shared assessment submissions and an XML schema for validating and accepting those submissions as XML documents.

The CSI web-based compliance questionnaire framework can run on its own or be directly integrated with existing operational risk systems.

About Collaborative Software Initiative

Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) was founded in 2007 by Stuart Cohen, a veteran IT executive and former chief executive officer at the Open Source Development Labs.

Cohen has partnered with Evan Bauer, financial services industry veteran and former chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, to bring together like-minded companies to build software applications at half the cost of outsourcing.

CSI introduces a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to building Collaborative Software -- software developed or acquired by a variety of companies at a fraction of internal developer or outsourcing costs.

CSI engages the power of community to build project teams and provides the central project management function for developing Collaborative Software, including development, testing and support for the code.

The CSI also offers the software to a broader base of customers under the open source licensing or Software as a Service (Saas) models.

For applications that don't enable competitive advantage or are associated with non-value added activities such as compliance, Collaborative Software allows business managers to maintain individual control and direction over a project while accelerating compliance, reducing costs and consolidating project timelines.

CSI delivers on this new promise of Collaborative Software -- on time and on budget.