redmonk – Vendorprisey

Copyright, EFF Open Rights Group, and forming an opinion on digital rights.

Video here, if not visible.TEDtalks session

I think I’ve read everything that Larry Lessig has published, and I saw him live a few years ago at the Oxford Union. This TED talk is one of his best. Restricting presenters to 20 minutes is a good discipline, at least in this format. Lessig is a master of using multimedia to delight and enhance his message, and his images leave an indelible residue in the back of your mind. Next time you hear a brass band, you will think of Lessig, and the need for copyright reform.

As adults we form opinions and take positions on issues such as war, abortion, death penalties, speed limits, drinking ages, the environment, human rights and so on. It is part of what defines us as human beings. It is time we did the same with copyright. Understanding copyright and intellectual property generally, and forming your own opinion about them is vital. I believe that as adults, we have a responsibility to understand copyright, its good bits and its problems, and have an informed opinion.

As politicians blog, and use youTube, Twitter and the like, it is also time we heard from them about what they think of copyright. When you decide who to vote for, you assess their positions on a whole slew of factors, I’d ask you to add copyright to that list. I notice that John Edwards has come out in favour of net neutrality, but I’d love to know what his and the other candidates’ positions are on copyright and patents…

Some people have heard of the EFF, and indeed an EFF sticker on the Mac Book is rather trendy in digerati circles.

from pixelm

It is worth spending some time over on the EFF site, and on Chilling Effects. The EFF is primarily focused on the US issues, but these are important for the rest of us, as US law and lawlessness has global repercussions.

If I’d been to Berlin for web 2.0, I would have listened to Cory Doctorow’s presentation on copyright. Instead, I’ll have to rely on Stephanie Booth’s notes.

It is timely that my favourite law blogger, Geeklawyer, mentioned Org, ( Open Rights Group. ) This is the UK equivalent of EFF. According to the said Geeklawyer, who is sometimes reliable…

Jolly good job too. As it’s 2007 report shows it has more than lived up to its promise and done some magnificent work for such a new and minimally funded organisation. For example so far it has influenced the Gower report, helped shine an unwelcome spotlight on the farce of e-voting in the UK and counterbalanced the gross dissembling of the shadier parts of the copyright industry. It’s now a central media resource for journalists needing more balance in their reports – something desperately needed.

I’ll quote from the report here.

Further, digital technologies are affecting citizens’ ability to exercise their existing legal rights
effectively, as some segments of the private sector have increasingly looked to government to extend their rights in an effort to prop up outdated business models. And digital technologies may also generate new possibilities for public (non personal) data, though the UK government has tended to corral public sector information, limiting its exploitation and thus creative and economic opportunities.
For too long, there has been little informed public debate in the UK about any of these issues. Media coverage and policy-making has largely been driven by agendas set in Whitehall and corporate board rooms and there was no organisation in the UK defending citizens’ digital rights

For those more technically inclined, James Governor has this to say.

ORG is now looking for more money and more members as it further professionalises. So if you’re in the UK sign up. The EFF is nice and all, but the ORG is looking after local issues. In fact I am going to go make a donation right now!

(Actually I think James and Geeklawyer ought to meet!)

Check out the ORG wiki here. The board and advisory council of ORG has some serious heavy hitters on it, including the drummer of Blur, one of the Cluetrain authors and several top legal academics.

You may read the EFF and ORG stuff, and come to a view that you don’t agree with them, and that copyright is fine the way it is, or even that Disney etc need more rights. That is your democratic right. But I’d ask you to form an informed opinion.

The civil rights battles of this century will be fought online – by groups of passionate,technologically keen, articulate volunteers like ORG.” — Cory Doctorow, author

There is more to the copyright question than copying music.

Technorati tags: copyright, EFF, ORG, Lessig, Geeklawyer, Redmonk, TEDTalks

Outside in development, deli.cio.us, democracy and the colgate twins

Del.icio.us is a fine thing. Ambient, not intrusive. A gentle whisper, not the loud whine of a “may interest” email. My life needs more via: and a whole less CC:RE:FW:

Courtesy of James Governor’s deli.cio.us links I saw Carl Kessler’s outside in development. I’ll be ordering the book, as I’ve just read Eric Von Hippel’s Democratising Innovation. The user as a locus of innovation has been a recurring theme in this blog, and Von Hippel’s book is helping me frame this more clearly.

Teched, IVNS, SDN, BPX seem to fit well with von Hippel’s Innnovation Communities concepts, and validates his point that user-innovators are willing to reveal their innovations. And speaking of lead users, over in Vegas, at SAP teched, the colgate twins showed the greatly enhanced version of their Wii experiment, now dubbed Majority desk.

photo from Marilyn’s marvelous Flickr stream. Ed in action.

Check out the video, courtesy of Cote. There are more details here,here and here.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/10/PID_012730/Podtech_MajorityDesk_Wiimote_widget_d.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/4299/majority-desk-wiimote-3d-widget-desktop &totalTime=277000&breadcrumb=e88ba36f1bf34090974acf2c3f595dde]

Cote from Redmonk is on a roll with his teched coverage

One thing is completely cemented in my mind after CommunityDay: Adobe and SAP are going to have a baby soon. I’ve seen plenty of hand-holding over the past few years and SAP-land developers innovating with Adobe products at the edge. But, now I’m pretty convinced that we’ll see Adobe’s RIA stack as one of the new front-ends and ways of “engaging” with SAP-land

That’s the kind of couple you’d never expect, right? Hip, Macromedia-skin graphed Adobe gettin’ fresh with suit’ed up SAP. The early dancing must have been awkward, but they seem to be working it out.

Also have a look at the enterprise UI blog’s coverage. There is lots of video and second life for teched, and I’m going to watch the O’Reilly talk tomorrow, but it has had plenty of coverage already. SAP as a web 2.0 company. (but why aren’t the teched vids on youtube?)

I bet most people would regard the title of this post as an oxymoron. Surely SAP is a big, boring enterprise software company, about as far from the furious consumer innovation of Web 2.0 as you can imagine. Yet it’s been clear to me for years that SAP takes the ideas of Web 2.0 very seriously

It seems to me that Von Hippel’s user led innovation fits very snuggly with O’Reilly’s “collaborative intelligence”

SAP is also doing some great “in vivo” co-development with customers, with customer innovators invited to spend six months working directly with the imagineering team at SAP, reporting what they learn back to their company via blogs, wikis, and podcasts. I’ve often noted that Web 2.0 actually began with open source and collaborative development as early examples of how networking changed business processes. Here’s a really practical way for enterprises to put new forms of collaboration to work

Much to ponder.

(photo from marilyn’s stream,)

I’m looking forward to teched in München. I’m lucky enough to be going as a blogger. I’ll be at the community day, and it will be fabulous to meet in the meat some of the SAP geeky gang that I’ve only met via the blog. I’m especially interested in what Nigel has to say about SAP-wordpress integration.

Technorati tags: SAPTECHED2007, SAP, BPX, SDn blogger, ed hermann, Dan Mcweeney, redmonk

ByDesign is here

Warning. A year or more of NDA makes for a rambling gush.

Most of the launch coverage in the blogsphere has been positive, even some of SAP’s more strident critics are upbeat about the vision and progress. Dennis provides an extensive review of the enterprise irregulars coverage. Herewith my take after watching the cast and reading a goodly number of posts.

A1S now has a name. I heaved big sigh of relief that there is no number in the name, and personal pronouns are absent. I really like the prominence of the word design in the name. Design thinking needs to be at the centre of what SAP does, so seeing it in a product name is a damn good way of reinforcing that.

Having a sharp focus on a defined segment of the market helps SAP defeat its biggest competitor in the long term. SAP’s biggest competitor isn’t Oracle, Microsoft, or even the cannibals. It is complexity. This is our Bauhaus moment.

It is also good to see SAP’s leitmotiv, Integration so prominently mentioned in the presentation. The message is as relevant today as it was when the company was formed.

Testing and learning.

Several months ago I spent a day testing the HR part of the solution. I hired an employee, gave them biographical and compensation data, work schedules, and so on. I didn’t need any training, and I didn’t look at a manual. Sure I found some bugs, but this stuff works. The commitment and intensity of the development team really impressed me.

I’m with James Governor on the GUI form. The 5 shades of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit Baby Blue doesn’t really do it for me. But this is version one.

Leo mentioned ADP in his presentation. More than any company in the world, ADP understands delivering software as a service at a competitive price point at a profit. By working closely with ADP SAP will learn alot about what it takes to really scale this offering profitably. ADP gets hugely significant new channel to market. So it is a win-win. This relationship points to a new form of partnership.

Fine young Cannibals.

I’ve not figured out all the cannibalising discussion, but to me it boils to down to brand management. It is a challenge that successful product companies have to deal with all the time, whether they sell toothpaste, mainframes, high end bicycles, golf clubs, processor chips or cars. It takes skill and timing to manage a product portfolio.

James Governor told me that IBM have managed multiple product lines for years, and did it well. Consider the As/400 and the RISC line….His post is spot on.

…BusinessByDesign is exactly the kind of shop that would traditionally buy a packaged application running on an AS/400. The kind of customer that would forget about its server and put it behind a drywall…

This reminded me of an interview that Hasso Plattner did in 1997. (exact unedited transcript)

HP: Yes. The idea of R/3 was to build a system for the AS 400. AS 400, small computers, so we wanted to cover the low end of the market, because R/2 was well established on the high end. We had no intention to shut down the R/2. So R/3 was meant to cover the low end of the market. Now we can’t run on the AS 400. It didn’t work, physically didn’t work. C was not there, and all the ingredients of SAA never arrived in those days on the AS 400. Now it was obvious that SAA will collapse. The Whitewater Project collapsed in IBM, Advanced Manufacturing Project in Atlanta. They shut this project down. Two thousand people working on a manufacturing system. Our biggest threat ever. And Office Vision was struggling, and later abandoned. We said now we have to move on Unix and we go for the low end of the market. Despite we had this experience of nearly unlimited computing power, we were only limited by the database, a simple database computer. The capacity of the database computer.

The first prospect in Germany for R/3 we thought is a so-called medium sized market company dealing with screws. They are a large screw dealer. When we learned more about the company, the company had two billion in revenues in 1991. The company was operating in eighty countries in the world. So this mid-sized market customer all of a sudden had one of the largest warehouses in Germany, was–~~as far as transaction rate is concerned~~–larger than the largest R/2 customer in operation. That means from day one all these ideas how we go for the low end of the market got stalled

There are black swans lurking in the most unlikely places. The genius of Plattner, Hopp, Tschira, Zencke , Kagermann and the gang in the 1990’s was to exploit it. Changing your mind decisively is a rare skill. Peter Zencke played a vital role in that decision back then, so the chance that SAP has forgotten the power of a serendipitous challenge accepted is slimmer than a Kate Moss look alike contest line up.

And on a sartorial note it was good to see HPK wearing a different tie.

Technorati tags: SAP, ByDesign, A1S

Understanding CSR..

I’m becoming deeply interested in corporate social responsibility, partly from a SAP product point of view, but more because I’m fascinated by the relationship between business and broader society.

Much of what I’ve learnt about CSR over the last year or so has been through talking with James Farrar and James Governor.

Global warming is apparently the world’s most boring topic, yet despite this, James weaves carbon offsetting, the pope, Ian Paisley and Leonardo DiCaprio together into a most insightful, witty post titled spiritual offset.

Not that the Holy See is being complacent about climate change, while it is clearing the path for us to the eternal, it is also still managing it’s own carbon footprint back here on this mortal coil. Last month the Vatican announced a massive carbon offset programme

I’m convinced that sustainability issues will become increasingly vital, both in terms of customer and shareholder relationships. It isn’t just about green issues, but the recent protests at Heathrow and the growing activism across the world point to a rapidly changing social fabric.

In the meantime, it is critical for all major organisations whether business, government or even the church to have antenna up, information on hand and be at the ready to engage intelligently with increasingly enabled and informed stakeholders

Welcome to the blogosphere James. Subscribed.

Technorati tags: CSR, James Farrar, James Governor

Podtech’s relevance?

Over on Techcrunch there is one of those blogsphere spats going on about Podtech. I’ve no idea about Podtech’s financing, its business model, or who said what, when. I’m the first to admit that 2.0 funding and revenue models are mysterious, I mean how on earth do you value Facebook anyway?)

I visit Podtech most days and find it very useful, so I thought I’d spend a moment jumping to their defence by rebutting the comment El Guapo left over on Techcrunch.

El Guapo

OK, I just went and looked at podtech.net. Wow, its horrible. Actually, I’m not even sure what it is or what they are trying to accomplish. Who wants to watch videos about IBM SOA conferences? I say queue up the dead pool…

I want to watch videos about IBM. For anyone working in the software industry, and who hopes to sell any software to any sort of enterprise ought to understand what IBM are up to. Scoble’s interview with Mike Moran is a must watch for anyone in software marketing. It touches on the cluetrain, search and the death of the brochure. (Dennis agrees)

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/07/PID_012043/Podtech_InternetStrategy_IBM.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3712/talking-with-an-ibm-distinguished-engineer-about-marketing &totalTime=889000&breadcrumb=4970f5a1a5164ea1a39f304e36843798]

If you’d like to glimpse into how large corporations are using Second Life and Business Game Simulation, then watch James Governor’s chat with Sandy Carter

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/07/PID_012033/Podtech_ibm_sandy_carter_soa_education.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3703/sandy-carter-on-ibm-soa-education-bpm-games-and-the-soa-business-catalog &totalTime=434000&breadcrumb=f6d95752796b4263a2d297c45a011679]

Also I watched James talking with Robert Le Blanc (interesting bits on IP), and Ali Arsanjani on snowballs and fractals. Putting a human face to SOA is goodness.

El Guapo, you might find this boring, but I don’t. Keep it coming Podtech, and I’ll keep watching.

Technorati tags: podtech, SOA, redmonk, ibm

(disclaimer: James is a mate)

Fooled by Randomness. Black Swans, Donkeys and Turkeys.

Last week James Governor kindly bought me lunch and gave me a book. The curry was very good, but the book has had a profound impact on me. It is not often that I finish a book, and then immediately read it again. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Fooled by Randomness is such a book.

Throughout my business studies at university, I heard a lot about the rational man. Rationality became something assumed. At the centre of most economic, efficient market and business theory is the rational, self interested behaviour. This book knocks that on the head.

Nassim has performed format c: on a goodly portion of my naive assumptions about financial markets and life in general. He has validated lots of what Francis Antonie and Douglas Irvine taught me as a political philosophy student years ago and I’d forgotten. It is time to dust off Karl Popper, and start thinking again.

Photo from Flickr by launceston_lad

Black swans are symbolically important, because until Australia was discovered, it was believed that all swans are white. This is a good example of a logical fallacy. There is a difference between there is no evidence of black swans, and there is evidence of no black swans.

We humans tend to fall into the induction trap. I do it a lot.

In the airport on the way home I spotted his new book. It has the title, you guessed it, Black Swan. I was glad my flight was delayed. I could read more of it. He Americanises Betrand Russell’s chicken, turning it into a turkey.

A little googling and I discovered Knackeredhack he has a good review of the book here ,as well as an excellent interview series.

Nassim’s motto is

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know.…” (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race).

Nassim writes very well, the prose is tight and buzzword free. He doesn’t dumb things down and he explains without being condescending. He merges a fantastic knowledge of the classics with a profound grasp of probability. He is witty but serious.

So many new things to learn, and so much that I learned decades ago but need to rediscover: Hindsight bias, Platonic folds, logical fallacy, epiphenomena, exquisite cadavers, induction, Mandelbrot, Hume, Wittgenstein’s ruler, negative skewness, Extremestan and Mediocristan.The list goes on.

My readers will have noticed I’ve been working on trying to understand risk recently, and Nassim’s work has made me realise that risk isn’t as simple as I thought it was. After spending most of my adult life avoiding statistics, I’m realising the folly of my ways.

I’d better build my antilibrary.

By coincidence I stumbled on this post from the O’Reilly Radar this morning on the beauty of statistics. Watch Professor Rosling video. Swivel also looks rather interesting. Just remember those black swans….

Technorati tags: Black Swan, statistics, fooled by randomness, James governor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

SAP Palo Alto, software design and Fred’s steak.

Some of you may have noticed my interest in things “design” over the last couple of months. I have been reading folks like Kathy Sierra , Diego Rodriguez, John Maeda and Bruce Nussbaum. This has led me to all sorts of interesting places on the web, including the Design Museum.

Well, I’m on the fringes of a design project here at SAP, and I have spent the last week in Palo Alto at SAP labs. I’ve been immersed in discovering design led innovation, ideation, personae(s?), artifacts, use cases, and so on.

Design at SAP…

Over the past decade or so, we have received considerable and often valid criticism for an overly complex GUI experience.

This isn’t good. To quote Dan:

I would argue that for the next generation of people who will soon ( < 10 years ) start to get into decision making positions at Fortune 1000s UI ease and flexibility will be nearly as important as all the process stuff already boiled into SAP software.

Fixing it.

A couple of years ago Hasso Plattner set up the Design Services Team (DST). The goal is to bring a stronger design ethos into our software development process. The team works with developers around the world to instill a user-centric design discipline. They also work to identify new design trends and provide expert services to other organisations looking to focus on the user. Shock horror they actually work with real end users to see how they use our software. The team is multi-disciplinary, and many of the team members have a design background and come from places like eBay and Apple. Internal design missionaries, if you like.

It is alot more than just GUI…

This is what they mean by design thinking

The core values of Design Led Innovation:

Have an Outside-in Mindset
Use Empathy for Users & Stakeholders .Embrace diversity
Think holistically
Collaborate in multi-disciplinary teams
Generate many new ideas
Find & iterate alternatives
Fail early and often

Hasso has donated lots of money and time to design. He donated 35 million to the Stanford Design School and has also invested significantly in the Hasso Plattner institute in Potsdam. I’ve blogged this here. The DST also facilitated the developer challenge- you can find more here.

This project – what I learnt.

We are working at dramatically improving a complex, messy, global, internal process at SAP, both from a process and eventually from a product standpoint. The workshop included internal end users, managers, solution management, design folks and me.

My job was to provide a look at the competitive landscape and to explore how social computing might impact the process. (I’m being a bit cryptic about what the process is, as the process owner would rather I’d not blog it)

As part of the project the DST is doing similar sessions with users from various industries and sizes in the US, Europe and Asia, some of them SAP customers, some of them not.

My key takeaways from the process.

It isn’t easy.

“Post-its” rock.

The rules. Not bad rules for any brainstorming process.

An aside:Jeremiah documented the process and outcomes live in an internal wiki, which in itself was an interesting 2.0esque validation for me. I spend lots of words pontificating on the power of the wiki, but actually seeing it used as a real time documentation tool, rather than just as a repository of record for documents created elsewhere, hit home.

Thanks to Loren, several Mikes, Jeong, Erin, Jing, Matt, Peter, Pam, Vivien, Ben, Diana, Christoph, Harry, Ben and Jeremiah (sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone) for an eye opening learning experience. And to Mike and Doree thank you for a wonderful evening and the introduction to Fred’s steak and Arrested Development.

In other news Jeremiah and I have a chat with James and Cote on Redmonk radio. I ramble on about the DST and ERP amongst other things. It is weird listening to your own voice. I have neither the voice nor the face for radio.

For those that write SAP off as an innovation-free zone, I say watch this space.

Technorati tags: SAP, Design, Palo Alto, Redmonk, SDN blogger, enterprise irregulars

Cricket, long tails, podcasting….

I’ve just left City airport in London – homeward bound should get home at midnight. I left Frankfurt on the 7.00am flight, a long day for vendorprisey, so this post will say nothing of significance. (Actually I’m finishing this up at home now)

If you were expecting a tussle with Vinnie or Nicholas Carr you will be disappointed. I’ve noticed there is a bucket load of commentary to digest about the SAP analyst meeting, some positive, some not. I’ll return to that tomorrow.

On the flight out I listened to the test match day 4 summary podcast from the BBC. By the time I’d landed, day 5 was over, and In case you are wondering, the Australians beat England again, exposing England’s long tail. Not much has changed since 1882

The highlight of Harris’ tour was a game billed as an “English XI” against “Dave Gregory’s Australian XI”; it was this game that later got recognised as a Test. Lord Harris’ side was weak, with a long tail.

That folks, is the original meaning of the long tail.

The Aussie commentator, former wicketkeeper, Ian Healy summarises the 5th day here.

My German and American colleagues are amazed-baffled that I can get pleasure from a game that lasts five days, but the Indian colleagues and I lament the lack of legal cricket coverage in Germany, despite the power of Internet radio and TV. Clicking refresh on the cricinfo text based coverage is not quite as good. I have been known to read a whole test match though.

BBC, Channel 9, if you are reading this the long tail of cricket fans is in Walldorf. I reckon we could even pick a side. I will be scorer and 12th man.

I also listened to two of the recent Redmonk podcasts. The combination of James and Cote is always interesting. It a blast of contrasts. James is all fireworks, Cote all silkysmoothlaidbackness. James managed to remind me about CICS. Cote interviewed the Rednun, Anne. I look forward to hearing and reading more from her. Her blog is in my RSS feed.

I would like Cote to do a podcast of a bedtime stories for geeks who can’t put down their blackberries at night.

“Hi, this is Cote on Redmonk Radio, put down your blackberry now, close your eyes, and listen to the story of the three elastic cloud servers and the declarative ajax fairy.”

“Tomorrow, if you are very good, I’ll tell you the tale of how Ruby found her rails.”

Technorati tags: Redmonk, Cricket, long tail

breakfast and compliance…anything James can do I can do …..

James wrote a useful post about CA compliance positioning. CA is an interesting case, they have had compliance challenges themselves, but as a business they really seem to be getting their house in order. I found this presentation via good old google this morning. (hope CA is okay with me linking to it) Check out slide 9, about the reduction in costs that they have achieved. At the event James attended CA obviously pushed its part of the continuous compliance story, but that is only part of the picture.

If you look to the presentation above, you’ll see that a core ERP platform and control tools are a key part of the story. In this case, SAP ERP, and Virsa. (now SAP GRC) Slide 19 gives a good view of how the CA and SAP compliance messages fit together.

I like it when software companies walk the talk. CA is one of them. So is SAP.

Coincidentally I had compliance for breakfast this morning too. I met up in in Heidelberg, with Jan Nordhagen. We had breakfast on a terrace in the early morning sunshine loooking out over the Neckar. (lousy job this)

Jan was the MD of Virsa in Europe, and now heads up the GRC sales efforts in Europe at SAP. Bright guy, really driven and has a passion for compliance. We talked about compliance, kids, mergers and why he should sponsor our charity bike ride. There is some real momentum behind the SAP compliance story here in Europe, it isn’t at all like Vinnie makes it out to be, vendors chasing the SOX gravy.

Compliance is less of a “new trendy thing” here in old europe, and opening a sales pitch with SOX is often the quickest way to the door. There is a strong belief in many customers here that compliance is just good business practice, and we are seeing great traction for the SAP compliance suite from companies that dont have anything to do with SOX, for instance in the public sector. We also see great interest from private companies. Companies are looking to reduce the cost of audit, but the main goal is to embed compliance in core business processes, and not to see compliance as a reporting after thought, or as an evil government burden. There is a real belief in many companies here that transparency and real time controls are just good business practice. Q2 for compliance was very strong here, despite a generally slow market. It wasn’t all about SOX….

There is also a lot of interest in the Risk and Governance bit of the GRC story. There is a lot of cool stuff in development at the moment on risk management, based partly on the risk desktop that we developed internally for the CFO and the CEO here at SAP. There is lots of great stuff going on in this space. If SOX was the spark that made SAP..

1) dust off stuff embedded in the depths of boring boring erp and actively tell people about it. (Like the Audit Information System for instance)

2) Acquire Virsa, and expand the solutions..

3) Build partnerships with auditors and SIs to drive down the cost of compliance.

Then maybe things arent so bad as Vinnie makes out.

Virsa surveyed 93 customers; and found that customers report significant reductions in compliance cost and labour.

Reduction time of spent on internal audit                       35%
Reduction in internal external audit costs                       28%
Reduction in time spent managing authorisation risk       44%
Recduction in costs for managing authorisation risk        36%
Reduction in audit report findings for security                41%
Reduction in time required to clean up audit findings       39%

Technorati tags sap compliance redmonk virsa SOX