On March 10, SAP’s annual Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) conference will begin in Orlando, FL. We talked to Narina Sippy, SVP and GM of SAP’s GRC Group, to get a quick preview of the major announcements from the event. Sippy made four product news disclosures:

• The Enterprise Risk Management module will integrate with SAP Strategy Management. This means that risk appetite, KPIs, and other policies defined in Risk Management can now roll down to an entire business through Strategy Management, the layer in which risks are tied directly into policies.
• The Access Control and Process Control products have been updated so as to achieve integration with a greater number of third-party products. For example, SAP can tie into Identity Management provided by IBM, Sun, or Novell in order to verify if a specific employee is allowed access to a sensitive location or process.
• The new x-App Query Tool, developed in conjunction with SAP partner Greenlight, allows users to adopt a write-once approach to control checks. For example, a query written to check the presence of a control in an SAP application can be reused to check the same control in an Oracle system.
• A Global Trade Services application will allow companies to make certain that their cross-border transactions are compliant with trade regulations and environmental regulations.

More news about the upgraded GRC suite will be released next week.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor