SAP and Novell Expand Global Partnership to Help Customers Deliver Confident Business and IT Governance, Risk and Compliance Programs

13 October 2009

Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVL) and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the expansion of their existing global partnership to include the delivery of integrated governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions. The companies are cooperating on product integration and planning to collaborate on joint go-to-market activities and alignment of strategic direction related to GRC solutions. This includes integration of GRC solutions from the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio with Novell security and identity products, as well as plans for joint marketing and selling of the integrated solutions to joint customers.

The combination of GRC offerings from SAP and Novell - currently available and planned - will bridge the gap between business processes and IT security and controls. Together, SAP and Novell deliver to customers agility, transparency and accountability with a combined GRC offering that is unmatched in its support of end-to-end business processes and IT environments, providing quick time-to-value with certified integration and targeted solution offerings. The result is reduced risk, lower costs and improved business performance. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd 2009, SAP's largest ecosystem education event, being held October 13-16 in Phoenix, Arizona.

"As a highly-ranked global airline, we must meet strict safety requirements in order to demonstrate regulatory compliance," said Peter Brueggemann, director, IT Technologie, and chief security officer, Deutsche Lufthansa AG. "We are pleased that Novell is collaborating with SAP so that we can streamline the management of security and compliance policies across our SAP and non-SAP environments. This partnership provides to us a secure way to grant employees and partners access to our enterprise systems while also reducing our risk exposure."

Enterprises face increasing complexity around managing cost, compliance, security and risk. The IT infrastructure is a mass of incompatible systems with unique risk controls and policies, making compliance and risk management complex, time-consuming and costly. To address this, Novell, the leader in identity, security and compliance solutions, and SAP, the leader in business process, risk and compliance, are collaborating on the integration of GRC solutions that deliver the following:

  • Performance - by improving predictability and automating and enforcing common controls while providing transparency to business processes across the enterprise
  • Assurance - by lowering overall risk and increasing external and internal compliance
  • Simplification - by eliminating resource silos and inefficiencies and by automating the process of discovering and remediating high-risk business problems

With growing security threats and increasing regulatory oversight, companies need seamless integration of their governance, risk and compliance management solutions across the entire IT landscape," said Fiona Williams, partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Too many companies have created silos where audit and governance processes are duplicated at great expense in terms of both IT costs and human capital. The marriage of solutions from SAP and Novell enables companies to improve performance.

Expanded Partnership Delivers GRC Solutions That Offer Customers Clarity, Value, Strategic Insight
This announcement marks the latest milestone from the ongoing partnership between Novell and SAP, which started in March 2008. The following Novell® solutions have achieved SAP-certified integration with the suite of GRC solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio: Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments, Novell Identity Manager and Novell Sentinel™. These solutions unify user provisioning, access control and security event monitoring into a single comprehensive platform.

"The integrated offering from SAP and Novell furthers our commitment to ensure that our customers have the clarity and confidence required to effectively manage risk across their entire business processes and IT environments," said Narina Sippy, senior vice president and general manager, GRC Solutions, SAP BusinessObjects Division. "SAP and Novell share a large, joint customer base. Our collaboration in GRC provides them with a significant opportunity to leverage their existing IT investment to deliver greater business value and lower total cost of ownership. This is a key example of the SAP ecosystem at work."

"Combining our industry-leading identity and security management solutions with the GRC solutions from the world's leading provider of business software, Novell and SAP deliver business-relevant solutions that affect the bottom-line so that an organization's compliance and risk management program becomes a powerful strategic business asset for the organization," said Jim Ebzery, senior vice president of Identity and Security, Novell.

SAP and Novell plan to cooperate on many facets of marketing the combined GRC solutions, including communications, cross training, sales-enablement programs and partnership-performance management. The companies also intend to align efforts on strategic direction and future product roadmaps.

SAP® TechEd 2009 in Phoenix, Vienna, Shanghai and Bangalore
More than 12,000 SAP customers, partners and technical experts are convening at SAP® TechEd 2009, the company's largest ecosystem education event, to gain the inspiration and skills needed to maximize impact on their organizations at a time when companies need both skilled professionals and agile, efficient IT solutions that can efficiently adapt to change. In its 13th year, SAP TechEd 2009 is being held in Phoenix on October 13-16, and will be held in Vienna on October 27-29, Shanghai on November 11-12 and Bangalore on November 18-20. For more information, please visit www.sapteched.com. Join the conversation via Twitter at #sapteched09.

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About SAP
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 89,000 customers in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." For more information, visit www.sap.com.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications.

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