Cisco Selects SAP(R) Solutions for Governance, Risk and Compliance

by Scott Behles

Cisco to Standardize on SAP Solutions for GRC to Drive Business Performance, Help Ensure Regulatory Compliance and Proactively Mitigate Risk across Extended Global Enterprise

SAP AG today announced that Cisco(R) has selected SAP solutions for governance, risk and compliance (SAP solutions for GRC). The solutions will provide Cisco with business process systems to help the company unify its control initiatives and risk management across its extended enterprise. Cisco chose SAP for its proven leadership in business process applications and its innovative vision and approach to the management of compliance and risk across geographically dispersed, highly heterogeneous business and IT landscapes. Cisco will also take advantage of new, jointly developed network-aware composite applications for GRC that integrate network and application platforms to provide a more holistic view of the enterprise for better management of compliance and risk in today's dynamic enterprise. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE(R) '07, SAP's international customer conference, being held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 22 - 25.

"SAP understands the importance of linking and managing risk alongside compliance initiatives and corporate governance issues," said Chris Kite, vice president, global workplace resources and risk management for Cisco. "SAP solutions for GRC complement Cisco's belief that effective compliance and risk management require a scalable, integrated, cross-enterprise platform that makes use of common services and architectures including Cisco's Service- Oriented Network Architecture. SAP solutions for GRC, combined with our announced collaboration in market innovation around network-aware GRC composite applications, provides us a platform to transform the effective management of business-critical events, interactions and transactions across our global enterprise. This platform also delivers on our belief that strong corporate and compliance governance, as well as the management of risk, is a competitive differentiation."

SAP solutions for GRC promote business viability by unifying corporate strategy, control initiatives, opportunity discovery and loss mitigation across the extended enterprise. The portfolio of solutions enables companies to efficiently and effectively enforce collaborative and continuous authorization and access controls; helps customers ensure compliance by centrally monitoring key controls for business processes and cross-enterprise IT systems; provides process support for collaborative manual and automated risk identification and monitoring; and serves as a standard for managing all foreign trade processes.

"Cisco has a deep understanding of GRC and how to turn compliance and risk into a strategic asset," said Amit Chatterjee, senior vice president, SAP's GRC business unit. "We are delighted Cisco has chosen to implement SAP solutions for GRC as their internal GRC solutions, and we're equally excited to be collaborating with them on a new breed of network-aware GRC composite applications that we can bring to our mutual customers. We will continue to drive innovation in the GRC space together with Cisco."

In a separate announcement also made today at SAPPHIRE '07, SAP and Cisco announced that they have entered into a global market innovation agreement to jointly develop a new breed of SOA business solutions that integrate the context of operational business applications with the intelligence captured throughout the pervasive network. The first set of jointly developed network- aware solutions will include three new composite applications for GRC in the area of data privacy and protection, IT and network security, and service level assurance. (For more information, see related announcement, "SAP and Cisco Expand Relationship, Collaborate to Develop New Breed of Network-Aware SOA Business Solutions," from April 23, 2007.)