A new joint venture dubbed Original1 opened for business on Monday, providing a powerful new option for business to protect their intellectual property and trademarks from infringement. Original1 will draw on the resources of Giesecke and Devrient, Nokia, and SAP to excel at counterfeit prevention, the company said.

Based in Frankfurt, Germany, Original1 will offer the ability to "track and authenticate products at item level," Computer Weekly reported. The tech news website also said that counterfeit product trafficking was a $200 billion per year industry internationally in 2007, and that the cost of domestic counterfeiting could be "several hundred billion dollars higher."

The former head of SAP Research, Claudia Alsdorf, will be in charge of the new joint venture, the company said, adding that the deal had won regulatory approval from anti-trust authorites in all applicable jurisdictions.

SAP entered into numerous partnerships over the past several months, including one with a South African company to help provide SAP support in that country and another with telecom giant Verizon to boost its level of mobile functionality.