SAP To Kick Off Developers' Conference With Sun, IBM PartnershipSAP To Kick Off Developers' Conference With Sun, IBM Partnership

SAP will announce Tuesday a partnership with Sun Microsystems and IBM that it says will make it easier to give users access to business systems while protecting companies' from compliance violations and other risks.

The announcement will be among several that will launch TechEd, SAP's annual technical conference for developers in Las Vegas. SAP also will make several announcements around its NetWeaver platform.

SAP will announce new Web services, or APIs, that let identity management vendors more easily link their software into SAP's access control software for meeting governance, risk, and compliance issues, called GRC Access Control. As part of the announcement, IBM and Sun are working to integrate their offerings -- Tivoli Identity Manager and Sun Java System Identity Manager -- with GRC Access Control, the companies said.

The collaboration calls for integration of critical compliance capabilities -- including segregation of duties enforcement, risk analysis and remediation, compliant user provisioning, role management, audit, and reporting -- with identity management functionality, such as user provisioning, authorization, and authentication, password management, and directory services. The end result is that businesses will more quickly be able to get users, such as new hires, access to enterprise applications and data stores that let them do their jobs, while at the time avoiding potential compliance violations or other risks, according to SAP.

Also at TechEd, SAP will announce the next wave of extensions and innovations for the SAP NetWeaver platform; a new program that makes it easier for developers to create apps on NetWeaver; and the status of its customer and partner ecoystem for enterprise SOA, according to SAP.