Approva Receives Strong Ranking in Research Firms Report on GRC Landscape
Report highlights company’s strength in both GRC management and execution
December 18, 2008 - Reston, VA
Approva® Corporation, a leading provider of risk and controls intelligence software, today announced that independent advisory firm AMR Research has ranked Approva in the “sweet spot” category for multiple capabilities including business process controls, user access controls and audit testing tools and applications. The “sweet spot” ranking designates companies that “demonstrated high expertise through customer deployment, reference quality, and heritage.” The ratings appeared in AMR Research’s recent report, “The Governance, Risk management, and Compliance (GRC) Landscape, Part 2: Software’s Integral Role in GRC Automation,” written by John Hagerty, Koppel Verma and Dennis Gaughan. A complimentary copy of the report is available at http://www.approva.net/resourcecenter/.
Approva offers a single unified system that continuously monitors for business exceptions across key processes that can lead to waste, fraud and unnecessary risk. “We are pleased that AMR Research has awarded Approva the highest possible designation in three categories that are fundamental requirements for effective continuous controls monitoring solutions,” said John Becker, CEO of Approva. “The report validates our leadership position and our approach of offering a unified system for automating key business controls and providing actionable intelligence for finance, IT and business users.”
The report, which evaluated twenty five vendors against their product capabilities in key areas of compliance and risk management, notes that “the best way to ensure GRC activities are repeatable, sustainable, and cost effective is to automate as many processes as possible with technology.” The report goes on to say that “systematically managing these projects gives more visibility into possible risks and exposure, ultimately providing more ammunition to do wat’s right, not just what’s the cheapest or quickest.”
The overall GRC market is forecast to grow strongly as companies increasingly look to automate. In a report earlier this year titled “The Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance Spending Report, 2008-2009: Inside the $32B GRC Market” published on March 25, 2008, John Hagerty, vice president and research Fellow at AMR Research, stated that “by any measure, companies are spending more money on a broad set of GRC concerns. Budget increases for 2008 and 2009 reflect a growing realization that GRC has matured in many ways: the emergence of risk thinking, the development of new buying audiences for IT, and an overall link to strategy and performance management.”
The AMR Research report puts forth a GRC Taxonomy that is useful to organizations looking to understand the various elements of a GRC strategy. According to the report, the GRC Taxonomy is categorized into GRC Management, GRC Execution and GRC Applications. The report identified Approva as having capabilities on all three parameters. Additionally, the report noted Approva’s capabilities in the area of dashboarding and reporting, initiative-specific content and data security.