SAP announced that it has enhanced the world-premier solution designed to help companies manage the complex business processes of cross-border global trade, and that the solution has achieved broad market penetration. SAP Global Trade Services was first introduced in 2002 and is now used by more than 250 global companies - including Applied Biosystems, Bayer and Halliburton - to help standardize and streamline end-to-end import and export processes to speed their global supply chains and ensure trade compliance.

The financial and healthcare industries continue to face increasingly more stringent compliance requirements. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are turning to business intelligence (BI) tools to help make sense of the mountains of data and to meet the stiff compliance regulations. Often though the most difficult, expensive, and complex part of using such systems is the challenge of organizing information into a standardized format and building the correct processes to get the right data through the correct BI tool.

Over the past several years, a number of factors have conspired to cause the security of information to become a critical business issue that's core to the operation of most companies. These factors include the recent corporate financial scandals, the rise of terrorism, and the increased concern over the privacy of user information. With security and privacy becoming more important everyday, the failure to maintain security over sensitive information could result in irreparable damage to a company's reputation.

In recent years the regulatory pressure on organizations to secure, document, and protect their data and systems has become increasingly difficult to ignore. There appears to be no lack of government regulations - both in the U.S. and abroad - that impose new laws requiring corporate accountability for controls placed on information and technology. Typically organizations implement controls by adding or replacing technology, processes, and staff. While the scope of the regulations reaches beyond Information Technology (IT) controls - covering many aspects of an organization's operations - IT departments seem to bear the brunt of the responsibility.

Sun's EVP of Software, Jonathan Schwartz, stated at a Software Day on the Sun Microsystems campus this week, that 'Sarbanes-Oxley will be a huge driver, as viruses and Sarbanes-Oxley are essentially about the same thing: knowing where the content is coming from and who the source is.'