SAP AG today announced new versions of products across its market-leading portfolio of SAP® solutions for governance, risk and compliance. As the leading provider of unified GRC solutions, SAP enables organizations to drive an integrated corporate strategy that synchronizes the management of enterprise risks, business controls and global trade compliance. The new product features will help customers accelerate resolution of security authorization issues without manual intervention, integrate risk and strategy management capabilities, assist in the central monitoring of business controls across multiple regions and IT landscapes, and help customers automate support for new trade and safety regulations. This announcement was made at the GRC 2008 conference, being held in Orlando, Florida, March 10 - 13.

Today SAP also said the GRC business unit has expanded its market footprint and seen strong adoption across regions and industries. Companies including Unilever and Veolia Environnement are among the leading global organizations that are deploying unified GRC solutions from SAP. By providing a unified, cross-enterprise approach to GRC, SAP helps customers deliver corporate accountability at both the line-of-business and boardroom level.

"Executives today are under pressure to manage risk more intelligently," said Lee Dittmar, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. "It is impossible to do this efficiently and effectively without the right information technology. Working together with SAP, we are demonstrating how information technology can and should enable our clients to better understand, monitor and mitigate risk. SAP's GRC strategy is consistent with a move away from stand-alone 'tools' toward an integrated, architected approach to meet enterprise needs. Our combined efforts are helping to bring business and technology leaders closer together, so that they can better align their business and IT priorities - while working to maintain and raise their standards of corporate accountability."

"In the face of an increasingly complex compliance environment, SAP recognizes that achieving corporate accountability while also reducing the cost of compliance is an essential business imperative," said Miles Everson, US Governance, Risk & Compliance leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Our collaboration with SAP, and the advancement of their unified technology platform, furthers our vision of sensible integration of governance, risk and compliance activities to increase effectiveness while reducing complexity and cost."

SAP Introduces Significant New Capabilities Across its GRC Portfolio

Building on its unified approach to GRC, SAP is releasing new versions of the SAP® GRC Access Control, SAP® GRC Process Control and SAP® GRC Global Trade Services applications. In addition, the SAP® GRC Risk Management application is now integrated with the SAP® Strategy Management application, part of the company's enterprise performance management solutions.

SAP GRC Access Control: "Management by Exception" Capabilities Intelligently and Automatically Resolve Authorization Issues

SAP GRC Access Control helps companies maintain compliance by validating that employee security authorizations match their roles and duties. The new version helps customers stay compliant, intelligently manage employee authorizations across mixed IT environments, allow for authorized exceptions and accelerate resolution of any violations - all while reducing costs. Innovative new features in SAP GRC Access Control take customers to the next level of compliance by:

- Automatically detecting conflicting roles and security authorizations. If overlapping roles are detected, managers are automatically notified of any security risks and initiate workflows to accelerate resolution without manual intervention. SAP continues to innovate with new "manage by exception" capabilities. - Scheduling regular, automatic reviews of all employees across the company to confirm job duties and evaluate whether existing system access matches proper security authorizations. The automatic review process will allow companies to more proactively guard against fraudulent transactions and data security breaches. - Centrally managing and controlling user access to various applications including SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft with new compliant provisioning capabilities. Simplifying access prevention and accelerating provisioning in mixed IT landscapes helps reduce the cost of compliance, audit and access management. SAP GRC Process Control: Consistent Controls Across Mixed IT Environments