SAN JOSE / PALO ALTO, Calif. - Sept. 6, 2006 - Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) announced today that they have entered into a joint marketing agreement for the United States and Canada that will address governance, risk and compliance (GRC) business processes and IT control issues across the entire IT infrastructure-from the network layer all the way through the application layer. The joint effort will help further enhance the effectiveness of SAP® solutions for GRC by taking advantage of the access and identity intelligence resident across Cisco's Service Oriented Architected Network Architecture (SONA). The marketing agreement encompasses collaboration in sales and marketing activities as well as advanced service offerings. The agreement takes advantage of the companies' complementary visions of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) via Cisco SONA Services for GRC to support successful customer implementations in a wide-variety of enterprise use cases.
Through this collaboration, SAP and Cisco are addressing the worldwide information management for the compliance market, which AMR Research predicts will become nearly a $28 billion market in 2007. Together Cisco and SAP are addressing two of the largest compliance challenges that companies face today: keeping up with the mandates associated with regulatory compliance and developing a sustainable process for managing risk across an entire company. These challenges have placed a tremendous financial and resource burden on companies around the world.
SAP and Cisco are collaborating by providing complementary solutions that offer new levels of IT management and controls between Cisco SONA and the three new applications in the portfolio of SAP solutions for GRC: SAP GRC Repository, SAP GRC Process Control and SAP GRC Risk Management. (See related announcement at http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.aspx?pressID=6674.)
The intelligent SONA services embedded in Cisco's networking solutions include: Application Oriented Networking, Unified Communications, security, mobility and identity services. To support SONA-based GRC software platforms, Cisco offers network architecture design, implementation and operation services based on a life-cycle approach and the customer's specific needs. The Cisco Lifecycle Services approach defines the critical set of activities required to help enterprise SAP GRC customers successfully deploy, operate and optimize Cisco SONA-based infrastructures.
"Customers are requesting that companies collaborate more to deliver systems that work together seamlessly," said Charles H. Giancarlo, chief development officer for Cisco Systems. "Cisco is working closely with SAP to deliver more network-based intelligence and bring more business value to our enterprise customers through integrated network services. We are partnering with SAP because we recognize the value of converging business and IT controls into a single GRC environment based on two industry-leading, complimentary architectures-enterprise service-oriented architecture and Cisco SONA."
"The combination of SAP's leading position in enterprise software and GRC applications and Cisco's expertise in IT infrastructure means that we are the two best qualified vendors to deliver a complete solution the spans the governance, risk and compliance market," said Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and executive board member, SAP AG. "The coming together of two industry leaders to provide an end-to-end offering is what customers are asking for in order to successfully tackle the enormous challenges associated with GRC. Working with Cisco is the logical choice to develop a foundation for a new class of network-embedded GRC that optimizes the accuracy and predictability of risks throughout the customer's business."
