I already pointed out my personal satisfaction about the recently announced cooperation between SAP and Novell in the GRC market. This morning I had the opportunity to discuss the whole approach with Jay Roxe of Novell and Ranga Bodla of the SAP GRC group, operating both out of the US. Besides my enthusiasm about the materialization of something I suggested to be beneficial (every once in a while, analysts DO show that they are humans, too!), the discussion of business opportunities, market pull and demand for GRC in general were almost identical between the three of us. First let's check the market pull: both companies said they received multiple requests by existing customers to provide insight on how to couple the more business-GRC oriented SAP solutions and the more IT-GRC oriented SIEM tool Sentinel of Novell. As open APIs were already available and Novell had their products on the path to SAP certification, taking the next step and analyzing the related business opportunity was only a matter of weeks. The joint approach beyond using and testing the APIs was then tested by a large consulting and system integration company in their labs. Looks like when there is a proven market, everybody is interested in providing a solution. Second, the demand for End-to-End GRC solutions: as KuppingerCole indicated during last year`s GRC event in Frankfurt, more general and broader oriented solution would be necessary and on offer soon. Only 10 month later, not a single-product but a joint solution IS available! SAP and Novell beat our projections and I guess it will take another 6-9 month before we either see another co-op or even a merger between two niche-players to offer a competing solution or product. Third, the business opportunity: SAP being the Business Intelligence provider they are, quickly was able to provide Novell with numbers on SAP GRC customers and quite a few hundred of them were identified as possible candidates to be addressed for a joint deployment. Vice versa, existing Novell customers with SAP deployments turned out to be of a significant magnitude, thus both groups form a considerable target. We at KuppingerCole can only second, that both the identified customers and the remaining “white space” in the market would benefit from a joint and integrated deployment – the former generating added value almost instantly – the latter reaping the benefits from the then (expectedly) available best practices generated by the early adopters. General perspective: KuppingerCole sees their own projections and analysis fulfilled ahead of time! SAP and Novell now have a considerable head-start in the market and thus have potential to counter offerings such from Enterprise GRC vendors such as BWise, OpenPages or Mega due to the breadth and depths of the combined solution. If you like to receive further insight, which GRC approach now makes sense for you, feel free to contact us and make sure to attend our upcoming related webinars http://www.kuppingercole.com/webinars