Oracle Corp. already offers tools that help companies comply with any number of regulations, in areas ranging from identity management to audit and IT compliance. Now the enterprise solutions company is set to announce a major expansion into the governance, risk and compliance applications market with the launch this month of the Oracle GRC Applications Suite. The new solution is designed to manage compliance across a "heterogeneous" system environment, with more visibility through expanded dashboard functionality and increased security via automated, pre-defined ERP controls. "We're broadening the offering to allow people to manage multiple mandates across multiple systems," says Folia Grace, vice president of Oracle ERP and BI applications marketing. "The dashboards are more flexible, with out-of-the-box key performance indicators, graphs and charts, and they can be customized based on the user's role and access to data without input from IT." The system comes with 200 segregation of duty and 500 internal control rules.

New features allow users to centrally manage policy, procedure and control documentation, risk assessments, control monitoring, risk reporting and secured company information. The GRC Applications Suite is the first product to follow Oracle's acquisition of Stellent, a maker of compliance and content management solutions. Many Stellent features have been combined with Oracle's applications controls and business intelligence, for risk and control performance. So, Stellent's document management capabilities can be tied to a particular business process to manage the process from documentation to sign off.