Vendor Report: SAP

SAP is the world’s leading vendor of enterprise business systems, with a core focus on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), but as well delivering application platforms for business processes and business intelligence solutions.

Within the broad portfolio of SAP, the areas of GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance) and IAM (Identity and Access Management) became more prominent over the course of the last few years, based on the fact that these capabilities are highly important for today’s businesses to as well fulfill compliance requirements as to optimize business processes.

Given the history and focus of SAP, the IAM and GRC efforts of the company are highly driven from a business perspective and less from a technical, IT administration-focused view like at many other vendors.

SAP has managed to become a key player in the GRC as well as IAM markets within a relatively short period of time, beyond the pure “IT play”. And SAP delivers on that promise, more than most other vendors especially in the core IAM market are doing. The success of SAP is based as well on their existing customer base as on a clear strategy with a strong business view on IAM and GRC – going well beyond the vision most other vendors in the market space (with a strong IT administration focus) have today. On the other hand, there are several shortcomings in the current status of the product and in the support for complex heterogeneous environments.