Study by Leading Independent Research Firm Highlights Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) as Top Investment Area for Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)

RESTON, VA--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - A study released this week by leading analyst firm AMR Research identifies continuous controls monitoring (CCM) as one of the top technologies companies plan to invest in over the coming year. The study, titled "GRC in 2010: $29.8B in Spending Sparked by Risk, Visibility, and Efficiency," by John Hagerty and Bob Kraus and published on November 18, 2009 was designed to assess the plans, motivation and spending priorities of US-based companies. A complimentary copy of the report can be accessed on Approva's web site.

The report highlights how the overall market for governance, risk & compliance (GRC) technologies has changed as companies increasingly look to realize a payback on their GRC software by better managing risks in their business, reducing compliance costs and improving the quality and efficiency of their business processes. Specifically, the report states: "Investments planned for 2010 are skewed toward defining the GRC universe for the company, then managing and monitoring against it. This is a shift from prior years, where companies focused on the piece parts -- document repositories, dashboard builders, etc. -- that would be needed to build a compliance management system."

In highlighting CCM as one of the top three software investment areas for 2010, the report noted that companies see the key CCM benefits as "cost reduction, fraud reduction, process improvement, and policy enforcement." The report goes on to outline specific challenges that companies are addressing with CCM software. "System configuration, security & access privileges, and the monitoring of business transaction/process (largely financial activities) are moving up the list in terms of priorities," the report says.

"With 47% of total 2010 GRC spending forecast to go towards internal efforts and manual processes, it is clear there's still tremendous opportunities for companies to automate," said Approva Chief Executive Officer John Becker. "Continuous controls monitoring offers a handsome and often immediate payback since companies can not only automate and expand their compliance and risk monitoring activities but also focus their resource-constrained staffs on responding to the highest priority risks and process breakdowns."

A research opinion on Approva entitled "GRC Profile: Approva," which was published by AMR Research on June 22, 2009 and authored by John Hagerty and Dennis Gaughan, highlighted how companies are using Approva's continuous controls monitoring applications to achieve the benefits cited in the 2010 GRC spending survey: "AMR Research has spoken to several Approva customers that have built impressive IT and business process monitoring systems that both reduced risks and paid out handsome dividends, specifically in terms of reduced head count and streamlined internal and external audit costs. In fact, some Big Four external auditors have built predefined packages with Approva's products that they use to facilitate their own audit processes." The research opinion went on to say: "Recently, we've given a thumbs up for an in-context financial analytic module that allows finance process owners to investigate transaction anomalies, drilling down from one account to journals to invoices."

The research opinion is a companion to AMR Research's report titled, "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 and published October 9, 2008. In that report, AMR Research evaluated twenty-five vendors against their product capabilities in key areas of compliance and risk management and 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."

Complimentary copies of the AMR Research Opinion on Approva the larger GRC Landscape Report and the recently released GRC in 2010 Market Study can all be accessed on Approva's web site.

About Approva

Approva® Corporation is the industry-leading provider of continuous controls monitoring software and is the industry standard at Big-4 audit firms. We enable business, finance, IT and audit professionals to identify, manage and prevent business exceptions in order to reduce compliance risk, increase operational efficiency and prevent inappropriate payments. Global companies such as Bayer, DirecTV, Discovery Communications, First Advantage, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and T-Mobile rely on Approva to deliver actionable and auditable intelligence of control breakdowns across their business systems, processes and transactions. Approva has certified integrations with Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and SAP to provide a holistic Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) solution. For more information, visit http://www.approva.net or call us at +1-703-956-8300.

Contact Information: For More Information Contact: Katina Fisk Approva Corporation 703-956-8415 Katina@approva.net