Oracle shows GRC suite to compete with SAP
The field of corporate governance, risk, and compliance is growing, and application giant Oracle wants a piece of the action; the company acquires Stellent, a contents management specialist, and is getting set to compete with market-domianting SAP
The field of corporate governance, compliance, and risk is growing — owing either to companies’ survival instincts in the face of terrorist activity and natural disasters or government regulations, or both. The big guys have noticed, and application behemoth Oracle is moving into the field, where it will find another giant, Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, waiting for it, ready to do battle for the hearts and minds of corporations. SAP, founded in 1972, is the world’s largest business software company, employing more than 38,000 people in more than fifty countries.
Oracle’s move into corporate governance applications was made with the 5 March announcement of the release of a new Governance, Risk, and Compliance Application Suite which brings together functionality from Stellent, a Redwood Shores, California-based company Oracle acquired last December, with compliance capabilities from the Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise Suite. Stellent offers content management capabilities which help companies to manage compliance initiatives in heterogeneous environments. The Stellent GRC framework, for example, manages risk and compliance across a company by creating a centralized hub of risk and compliance documentation, assessments, analyses, and loss information from related parts of the business. That capability is added to the compliance pieces already inherent in the Oracle EBS and PeopleSoft, which offer basic compliance applications. The new GRC Application Suite has three distinct components: infrastructure, a GRC process layer, and a GRC intelligence layer.
Folia Grace, Oracle’s vice president of application marketing, says that Oracle offers a lot of specific products to track risk-clinical trials, network optimization, trade management, and anti-money laundering — as well as generic workflows to track areas that Oracle does not cover.
Oracle, as we said, is not alone in its focus on the GRC market. We have mentioned SAP already, and next week we will discuss some of the other major players in this area.
-read more in Renee Boucher Ferguson’s eWeek report
