Peregrine Systems Inc. said Tuesday it would combine its asset-management, response-system, and integration software as part of an initiative to help government agencies and businesses better respond to and cope with crises.

Dubbed the Crisis Management Initiative, Peregrine's effort is designed to help organizations handle unexpected events. The software provides real-time views of assets that can be shared across multiple organizations; a system that tracks, via trouble tickets, the resolution of problems; and CAD tools that let businesses display and share drawings of buildings for security purposes. Among other features, the software also includes tools to assess the financial and operational impact of an event, as well as any damage to communications and network backbones. The software is expected to be ready for testing next week, says Peregrine chairman and CEO Steve Gardner.

The idea for the software bundle, scheduled for commercial availability late in the first quarter of 2002, began taking shape just hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Peregrine employees began sending E-mails to Gardner. Their suggestion: leverage Peregrine's action-request system, which helps companies manage assets, from IT systems to transportation to employee; and its business-integration suite, software unveiled last month that's designed to help companies link disparate applications, data formats, and business processes. Within a week of the attacks, Gardner asked Ken Boyd, Peregrine's VP of business development, to lead a team to build the new software.

"What we did in managing infrastructure and connecting diverse and heterogeneous systems is what the government needed to capture all sorts of data, condense it into data that is actionable, and get that data to people who need it,'' Gardner said in announcing the initiative at a conference at the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel, just a few blocks from the White House. "Putting this into the market today is a way for us to help do something for our country.''