Novell, Inc. and SAP AG have expanded their existing global partnership to include the delivery of integrated governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions. The companies are cooperating on product integration and planning to collaborate on joint go-to-market activities and alignment of strategic direction related to GRC solutions. This includes integration of GRC solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio with Novell security and identity products, as well as plans for joint marketing and selling of the integrated solutions to joint customers.

The combination of GRC offerings from SAP and Novell - currently available and planned - will bridge the gap between business processes and IT security and controls. Together, SAP and Novell deliver to customers agility, transparency and accountability with a combined GRC offering that supports end-to-end business processes and IT environments, providing quick time-to-value with certified integration and targeted solution offerings. The result is reduced risk, lower costs and improved business performance.

Enterprises face increasing complexity around managing cost, compliance, security and risk. The IT infrastructure is a mass of incompatible systems with unique risk controls and policies, making compliance and risk management complex, time-consuming and costly. To address this, Novell, the leader in identity, security and compliance solutions, and SAP, the leader in business process, risk and compliance, are collaborating on the integration of GRC solutions that deliver the following:

This announcement marks the latest milestone from the ongoing partnership between Novell and SAP, which started in March 2008. The following Novell solutions have achieved SAP-certified integration with the suite of GRC solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio: Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments, Novell Identity Manager and Novell Sentinel. These solutions unify user provisioning, access control and security event monitoring into a single comprehensive platform.