Have you ever thought about assigning the IT costs in a correct manner? Services and IAM will help you. Services are a means for a more granular view on what IT provides. That is true as well for the IT infrastructure services which are, for example, covered in ITIL. It is true as well for the services used in SOA concepts. But services aren’t sufficient. The assignment of IT costs requires the knowledge about the user. Who is using which services in which frequency? This question has to be answered as well. That means, that you have to know in the context of which user a service runs or – more abstract, for infrastructure services - is used.

Thus, bringing IAM and BSM together and combining IAM with SOA is the foundation on which a more efficient IT cost management could be build. And it is, as well, the foundation for the thing I would call ERP for IT.

A side effect of application security infrastructures

When writing my upcoming report on the architecture of application security infrastructures I thought also about potential business values of this type of service layer which sits between applications and the security infrastructure (in fact the term “application security infrastructure” is somewhat misleading because its more about a service layer which sits on top of the infrastructure – and the service layer is core, not the infrastructure). When thinking about the business values it became clear to me that there is a clear link to what I have written in “The ERP for IT” about the chance to use service orientation for making IT sort of a business unit.

Application Security Infrastructures can support IT to become more business-oriented and more economic. How? Very easy: These infrastructures expose defined services (security services, mainly identity services) to applications and network infrastructure components (for example “identity storage services” as interface to directories). The usage of these services can be measured. The costs of the underlying infrastructure can be measured as well and is related to specific services. So, in effect, you have the cost per use per service.

With that information you can for example predict the costs of new applications much more precise than before. You can assign the costs of the infrastructure much more precise than before to the consumers of the services. You can offer more efficient services for lower costs. And so on… IT can act like a business unit or, more familiar, like an “internal outsourcer”.

That is, from my point of view, one of the biggest advantages amongst the pretty long list of business values an application security infrastructure can deliver. For sure that isn’t unique to application security infrastructures, but applies to any move towards service orientation.

The acquisition of MaxWare by SAP finally has led to a new competitive situation in IAM. I define four segments or clusters of vendors in the market:

• The ones with focus on the business process
• The ones with focus on business service management
• The pure (or mainly) IAM vendors (and the ones which have a broader IAM portfolio but not integrated that into a higher level vision)
• The specialists 

To start with the first segment – these are the vendors who compete for becoming the leading supplier of the infrastructure for business processes. To do this, they need IAM to provide identity services into the new SOA-based business processes. The main vendors in this cluster are Oracle, and SAP (in alphabetical order…). Both of them are working on identity services, both two as well are working intensively on or providing solutions for GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance). You might add Microsoft to this segment because their main target is a vital role in the business process battle.

The second segment are the vendors with an infrastructure management history who today provide solutions for Business Service Management (or Business Technology Optimization or however you name it). The most important ones in this segment are BMC, CA, and HP. Yes, for sure – HP also has some service focus but the big story is about BTO, in their case. IAM is, from the perspective of these vendors, mandatory as a central part of the IT infrastructure to be managed. You might, by the way, add Völcker Informatik to that segment. They are no full BSM vendor but their philosophy is driven by many of the same ideas.

Then there are the IAM suite vendors like Evidian, Novell, or Siemens – and many others like Beta Systems, Courion or M-Tech. For some vendor you might discuss whether he is part of this cluster or a specialist but that will become more clear with my definition of that segment later. These vendors are providing sort of “standalone IAM”, with more or less completeness of their portfolio.

The specialists are vendors which focus on specific aspects of the broader IAM landscape. These include companies like SECUDE, Sxip, Ping Identity, Sailpoint, Titus Labs, G+D, or Bhold, to name just a few.

If you look for the big names in the list there are some missing, notably IBM and Sun. They are the typical “somewhere-in-between-vendors”. I’d put IBM in the BSM cluster, Sun in the “pure IAM vendor” box as the best fit. But as mentioned above you could also discuss about the positioning of HP, Voelcker and other vendors.

The more interesting question is about who will be the winners in this new formed competition – and the loosers. The most difficult situation, from my point of view, is the one of the “pure play IAM vendors”. Specialists might always find there place in the market or become acquired. But the IAM vendors who haven’t been acquired until now will have to rethink their positioning. Might they add something to enter another segment? Evidian might, being a vendor in the systems management space at well. Besides they are a specialist in E-SSO and they have a new focus on mid-sized businesses. Siemens has large customers and its eHealth specialization, plus some Telco background. So there are opportunities for further success for virtually any vendor in the market. But some might have to really think about their strategy to achieve a positioning which makes them competitive even three or five years from now.

During an analyst briefing I had some days ago with a leading vendor in the BSM space around the role Identity Management plays for BSM (which is quite important, given the fact that all leading BSM vendors are IAM vendors and that IAM plays a significant role within ITILv3) we came to the conclusion that there is no ERP for IT. There are specific ERP solutions for Finance, Customer Relationship Management, Product Lifecycle Management, and so on. But there is nothing for IT. That automatically led to the question whether BSM might fill this gap.

The discussion also was sort of a reminder to another talk I had some months ago with the CIO of one of the German DAX companies. His vision is about an IT with clear knowledge on its costs thus being able to predict the TCO (and not only development costs or an initial investment into infrastructure) of new “Business Services” IT delivers. These services might be applications or infrastructure services. He’d like to be able to predict the cost per user, the cost per use of a specific service or whatever you want. This ability would be the basis for a factual discussion about IT services and a granular accounting and might even lead to an IT department which is sort of a business centre (like an Outsourcer) and not only a cost centre.

Both discussions are around the way IT acts, about the role of Business Service Management and, in fact, about ERP for IT. The BSM approach which is required for that type of solution will go well beyond todays infrastructure focus. BSM itself is much broader than the IT infrastructure service focus of ITIL. But for that approach it will have to include much more functionality around application and service (in the sense of web services) management, something which isn’t covered that much by most BSM vendors today.

I personally believe that sort of an ERP for IT will be very interesting, proofing the fact that IT is today an important enabler for business and not just a technology department which burns money. The question is whether it will really be some of the large BSM vendors who deliver that new type of application or whether the ERP vendors will be the ones. I’ll wait and see.

You might ask yourself what this has to do with IAM (Identity and Access Management), my core topic. Well, first of all IAM is not my only topic. BSM is one which becomes more and more important for KCP due to the relationship to IAM – and one I’m doing research for quite a long time now. Besides this, there is another ERP for IT thing I’m currently thinking about. May be I’d better call it EIP for “Enterprise Information Planning” but it’s about enterprise control of information, the next real big step in IAM. I’ll cover this in one of my next blogs.