Ontic Welcomes SIGMA Threat Management Associates to the Family

Acquisition builds on successful partnership; brings new clients and industry sectors and advances physical threat management standard

The physical security industry has experienced a massive shift in the last couple of years largely fueled by new responsibilities around health and safety and a more volatile threat landscape as a result of political turmoil and social unrest. Now more than ever, corporations need tools that not only provide a comprehensive view of the threat landscape and surface critical knowledge but that guide the identification of threats, gathering of information, assessment, creation and implementation of plans for addressing threats.

That’s why we’re excited to share today’s news that we have acquired SIGMA Threat Management Associates (SIGMA).

Who is SIGMA?

SIGMA Threat Management Associates is a team of leading experts in behavioral threat assessment and threat management who provide threat assessment and violence prevention services to businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, military units, law enforcement and security professionals.

Dr. Marisa Randazzo, PhD, and CEO and Co-Founder of SIGMA, started the company in 2010 after spending a decade with the U.S. Secret Service as their chief research psychologist. She worked closely with law enforcement to train them on how to investigate threats, and most importantly, how to intervene when someone was planning violence — stopping that violence before harm could occur.

SIGMA has over 20 years of experience working directly in threat assessment and protective intelligence cases. Their team has broad expertise — from preventing stalking and fixation on CEO’s, to handling disgruntled employee behavior, veterans issues, and mental health concerns, to handling cases where there’s an impact to safety at an educational institution.

“Some people may not know that SIGMA is Greek for the word sum or sum total. It represents our approach to how we look at cases, and how we look at building threat assessment programs and helping our clients to build those programs. When we work a threat assessment case, when we help our clients work cases, we want them to have all available information, to have the sum total of things that are going on, things that are bad and increasing risk, and also to have an awareness of things that are good and can be used to decrease risk,” says Dr. Randazzo.

Combining threat assessment and protective intelligence

We partnered with SIGMA a little over a year ago, integrating its Workplace Threat Assessment module into the Ontic platform.

“Since then, we’ve worked closely with Marisa and her team on our shared vision of charting a course for a new physical security standard through the combination of protective intelligence and threat assessment,” says Luke Quanstrom, CEO and Co-Founder of Ontic.

With the addition of the SIGMA’s Workplace Threat Assessment module, Ontic’s Fortune 500 and emerging enterprise clients can implement a proven four-step protocol to help guide decisions around identifying incidents of concern, gathering necessary information through investigative research and interviews, assessing the level of risk and how significant or imminent it may be, and deploying appropriate actions to manage and mitigate the threat.

Physical security professionals can also employ the SIGMA Assessment Flows within the Ontic platform to create case management plans to address threats, identify gaps in existing processes that may lead to a threat, and implement improvements.

Introducing the Center of Excellence

In joining Ontic, Marisa becomes the Executive Director of the Ontic Center of Excellence (COE) where she will continue to provide the traditional SIGMA services, but now part of a broader mission with the ability to impact more industries and teams in need.

The Center will work hand in hand with the Center for Protective Intelligence. Marisa and her team will manage strategic consulting and services to support Ontic clients in developing threat assessment protocols that help them coordinate their protective intelligence programs.

With Ontic and SIGMA under one roof, there is tremendous opportunity to offer a holistic incident management, investigation and assessment experience that will be more accessible to a broader range of corporate security practitioners in the moment of critical need.

Fred Burton, Executive Director of the Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence adds, “This is a tremendous addition to Ontic. I’ve been in this business since 1981 and as I’ve said many times in the past, the missing ingredient to any protective intelligence program is exactly what SIGMA does.”

For more information, you can read today’s announcement, listen to the podcast or reach out to us directly!

Interested in learning more about the role threat assessments play in helping physical security teams see the complete picture of the existing risk level? Check out our whitepaper: The Role of Baseline Threat Assessments in Protective Intelligence.