The recent acquisition of EUREKIFY by CA does not come as a surprise, it was rather expected to happen sooner or later after the OEM/reseller agreement had been published. CA took what was left for grabs after SUN had (more to our surprise) settled an agreement with VAAU, who also had been in close cooperation with CA (and others) before. The consolidation regarding the role mining and role management market is in full progress and it is to be expected that each large IAM player in the market will cooperate if not acquire one of the smaller role specialists left in the field. As from the side of Eurekify, overall good/euphoric feedback on the deal was received. I tried to contact Dave Hansen to get his personal quote on the deal, but yet my sources at CA have not been able to push through to him. I, personally, think that this acquisition is good for CA and will strengthen their position, especially during the presales phase. Role mining and analysis as a service has become more important to assess the IAM-readiness of customers, allthough the value-add derived from an in-depth analysis is far bigger  than just acting as a bait to prospect IAM customers. I expect CA to position and integrate their newest toy as a core component in their GRC/IAM offering, as role modeling, provisioning, audit and the like are interwoven with each other and need to be dealt with in a joint effort.

Good luck! I am looking forward to a personal dialogue with IAM guys at CA!

Just a short note after meeting up with some ENSIM representatives (thanks for the opportunity!): after building some reasonable references in the european market and the recent acquisitions in the “MS infrastructure management market”, there definitly will be some growth potential for ENSIM in EMEA. Whereever AD and ID management is needed and automation is key, one should check out if the quite modular and customizable set of solutions could make a fit. I´ll look into the technology a bit deeper at the end of the year - so check back for more info and the capabilities of their products.

Also, I was informed that their local representation in Europe is going to be extended to accomodate the rising number of requests for demos and PoCs. Good for us at KCP to have some techies to talk to in our own time zone

Off to the evening reception at IIW, cu all soon!

Joining a special “reality” session was the best choice I made while attending IIW. Not only was this a wonderful opportunity to compare our KuppingerCole approach to providing insight and second opinion on the exact topic, but getting a deeper understanding of how to analyse and structure the whole process from the point of the Identity Architect. Most important was to learn about the projection and “5 year plan”, especially regarding assertions, federation and -naturally (for me) smartcards and certificates. Great to learn also, that usage of TPM (Trusted Platform Modules for Trusted Computing) as a secure storage for softtokens and certificates is gaining momentum (years after manufacturers started integrating them int PCs and laptops). I will definitly check back with the “anonymous” presenter during the next years to see his strategy evolve, especially as my recent learnings on biometric authentication schemes, SSO and strong auth in general were my pay-back to the architect.

To my special friends at Infineon: hey, your products are actually in need on this side of the ocean and there IS business to be made with TPMs!

One of the fancy things about conferences like IIW is that lots of entrepreneurs and start-up people mingle with each other, which is how came to “poke around” a little. POKEN is a cute little way to give the traditional exchange of the business cards and the following procedure of scanning/creating vcards a tad bit easier…

Dave Brown of POKEN had a little session on how to facilitate the exchange of contact information without the hassle of activating bluetooth, entering data manually or other hurdles. One can get a small (and cute) token  called poken (USB and wireless, sor of NFC) with an individual ID in it and that “connect” to other poken owners just by bringing the two pokens together. Easy as a handshake – especially cute as the pokens look like 4-fingered hands

During this process, the pokens actually handshake and exchange their IDs, which are then stored in the flash part of the device. Once you hook the poken up to your computer, it reads the IDs recently learned and finds the corresponding contact information (in the InfoCard format) online. This InfoCard contains as much information as the related poken owner wants it to contain, enabling one to share a single website, email, phone number or other attribute, or offer full profile information if desired. Fun and useful fact: one can chose between up to three “profiles” depending on the context you meet a poken-person in.

I overheard that the poken could also be put to use as sort of a simple hardware credential, but I will need to investigate further… Meanwhile, if you are interested, check out www.doyoupoken.com. You can connect your personal poken to your profile there and start “pokin´around”.

Howdy?
I am sitting in the lounge of IIW2008b, or the Internet Identity Workshop, Fall 2008, in the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. Well, I am expecting the start of the event, as it will be kick off at 1 PM… I am really looking forward to this as I travelled all around California the last two weeks and the impression have been overwhelming so far. According to Dave Kearns, (thanks for a delicious dinner!) it will be quite a nice event!

Stay tuned for some up-to-date info what´s happening here!

Sebastian