The a new Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) suite combines business intelligence capabilities in some Oracle-developed products with the compliance management and enterprise content management tools it gained with its of Stellent Inc. last November.
The new Oracle Fusion GRC offering expands considerably on the compliance-support capabilities in the company's E-Business Suite 11i software by supporting both Oracle and non-Oracle business applications, said Folia Grace, vice president of applications marketing at Oracle.
The suite includes Oracle Fusion GRC Intelligence, which provides an out-of-the-box dashboard along with reporting capabilities and Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance Manager, which monitors business risks, automatically highlights potential weaknesses and initiates corrective actions. The suite also includes an Application Configuration Controls, which can monitor 500 control processes in the Oracle E-Business Suite and help enforce corporate policies.
Aaron Sager, manager of business systems at ViaSat Inc., a Carlsbad, Calif.-based provider of satellite and wireless communications equipment, said he plans to use the suite to better automate the company's efforts to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
ViaSat currently uses the uses the Oracle Internal Controls Manager in E-Business Suite 11i to ensure compliance with federal requirements for creating corporate financial controls. The Internal Controls Manager is used to support documentation and compliance procedures.
Sager said that he hopes that the GRC Configuration Controls application will allow ViaSat to establish a set of rules and ensure that they are enforced. The tool promises to send out alerts if the rules are violated, said Sager. For instance, ViaSat might have an accounts-payable policy for transactions that dictated a purchase order be within a predetermined percentage of the amount of the invoice. If someone changed this policy, an alert would be sent to the appropriate employee, and the change could be prevented, he said.
ViaSat plans to start rolling out the new Oracle software later this year.
Michael Rasmussen, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said the new offering includes a comprehensive and sophisticated set of tools that support international reporting rules and complete risk management processes.
All products in the GRC suite will be available later this year. Pricing starts at US$995 per user.