AMR Research projects spending on government, risk and compliance applications and services will top $32.1 billion in 2008, up 7.4 percent from 2007. In 2009, growth is projected at 7 percent. In a really tough IT spending environment, these are pretty good numbers. This will be a front-burner issue for a lot of folks, so it never hurts to recap what the niche is all about. These software packages started out as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance applications. Financial controls are still key, but the feature set has expanded, notes Financial Week. The list includes "legal (email retention, data privacy), environmental (greenhouse gas inventories), financial (capital adequacy), and technology (IT governance)." Increasingly, the big boys--SAP and Oracle--are moving in with encompassing applications.  

For more:
- here's the Financial Week primer [1]

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