Well, I thought nothing could puzzle me regarding the IAM market these days - acquisitions, mergers, emerging start-ups.

This ONE “acquisition” really hit me: Dick Hardt joins Microsoft! I almost dropped my morning espresso shot, when I received his (mass-)email… Once I read through his blog-posts here and here  though, I fully understand and congratulate both Dick and my former co-workers at Microsoft! It almost makes me wish I was still there  - now with even more big AND versatile brains in Redmond it must feel like the “in the old days”… Nevertheless, I think the (not so evil) empire really was able to “strike back”. Hiring Dick shows that Microsoft really wants this IAM thing to work – not only product-wise for the enterprise market, but also for the general population “BORGrosoft drones”, which most of us still tend to be…

It really makes me book a flight to Seattle next spring to have some good Mac&Jack´s Amber, deep-fried turkey (see Dick´s blog) and most of all: some great discussion on Identity 2.1 , as I would call it from now on!

Dick & Jennifer: I wish you all the best in and around Redmond, it IS a great place to stay in the US!

Ray & Kim: nice catch

Looks like IAM and GRC is all about roles, doesn´t it? Well, for the sake of simplicity it does. Simplicity you ask, having had trouble defining these in a year-long struggle and ending up with worthless collections of access rights and user profiles due to the latest merger and the finance -crisis consolidation?

You have pretty good company as many organizations face these problems. A few years back when I worked for CA, a good portion of the IAM projects also included considerable amounts of work to be done on roles. VAAU, at these times the preferred role-mining specialist in the market, helped a lot getting this work done, especially in the early phases of the projects.  As companies are comparable to living organisms, they tend to change over time (sometimes rapdily), thus affecting the roles and profiles user might be mapped to.

Early role-mining only provided insight to the current situation the snapshot or analysis was made, leading to frustration and incorrect roles once the IAM system was about to be delpoyed. Vendors like former VAAU (now with SUN) and the recently acquired Eurekify (now with CA) learned their lessons, providing consistency checking and automated role-monitoring as new key-features. This evolved the early role-mining tools from providing fuzzy “best-before” role data into helpful GRC supporting tools, that constantly check if former analysis is still valid. One example: if members of a certain group of user sharing the same role get the similar exception or add-on to their access rights, Eurekify would suggest to make this exception a part of the role. This helps to manage expceptions before they become a labyrinth while making the life of admins and auditors easier.

Speaking of “easier”… during my recent briefing with a former Eurekify EMEA VP and now CA employee, the question came up on how CA will leverage the power of Eurekifys tools in their customer base. I was told that both existing IAM customers – regardless of which vendor they chose – will remain to be primary focus of the team, as the above mentioned role-management and role-auditing capabilities are available for all major IAM products in the market. I was pleased to hear that CA will continue to sell Eurekify technology without limitations – and was even more happy to hear that integration will extend the available webservice interfaces. 

Keeping this open mind and easy way to dsicover, integrate and manage will definitly be advantageous to CA partner community, providing audit, role-mining and compliance services with the former Eurekify tools.
I am looking forward to what happens next regarding the role-management tools and offerings – and also to what and when CA merges the Eurekify capabilities into their GRC and IAM tools!

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!

Hello World, hello Bay-Dwellers!

Either you look forward to meeting me or to avoid me   – pay special attention between October 27th and November 13th as I will be in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley to meet some people. Especially the IIW in Mountain View at the end of the trip will be a highlight – but if you like to meet me before, please contact Levent or myself, so we can make an appointment. Looking forward to meet as many “gentle people” in SF as possible, regardless of flowers in their hair or big ideas on identity management in their brains!

Comment or email me, if you have stuff that you think us “old world people” need to know!

Despite the fact that I clearly see CA´s recent acquisition of IDfocus LLC and their ACE technology as a plus to the whole offering of IAM technologies from CA, for me it is still sort of a “back to the roots”.

CA has had a (rather bad) history of acquiring companies whose technology would make a nice fit to the portfolio, but then coming out sub-par after 6-18 months. This was either due to human failure, aka not being able to keep the talented people or due to underestimating the market traction one could generate from a certain technology. From my point of view, Netegritys´ SiteMinder was one of those. Nice “solution” back then, but it was mistaken as a “product” by CA, and their sales failed to deliver the expected projects due to that.  

But there had been changes to the recently re-heated discussion on this “buy-and-let-die” strategy, a senior database vendor executive was blamed for coining.  The Niku Clarity solution prospered since the acquisition. Also, the Network & Systems Management tools were integrated and continue to excel (even though some brain-drain happened after those had been acquired). And,  last but not least, CA was also able to deliver first glimpses of the “innovate from within” strategie (see recently launched GRC products), Al Nugent as CTO had introduced a while ago.

So, why going back to the old habit? Well, we all know they are to resist! And in the case of an ever expanding field of IAM and GRC, one can only innovate so much from the inside with decreasing numbers of talented developers being available…

From my point of view, CA does the right thing in going back to acquisition, IF they keep innovating from the inside. Furthermore, they need to speed up on integration of acquired technology. I was quite happy to see their Identity Manager product integration finished with the recent release. But it took them more than 2 years – too long for a fast moving market like IAM & GRC.

I am looking forward to see how CA is dealing  with this, as it for sure could strengthen their position as IAM leaders, if played well.

During my recent analyst calls and briefings I came across a bunch of companies and products that all start to tackle an area I have been interested in for quite a while:

getting the “holistic security” approach well beyond the borders of our mindset – beyond the digital realm! Being a CISSP and full of interest for social engineering as well, ”security” has always been a wider topic to my understanding. And it looks like the industry is catching up…

First of all, there are those companies that try to bridge the management gap between native systems of both worlds, such as IDpendant. Then there are coampanies such as Imrivata with their SSO appliance or Made4Biz with their “Dynamic Security” product, both of which use combined functionality of established time&attendance (physical access management) solutions together with mechanisms in the IT access management (authentication) domain.

For IDpendant, making the joint administration of access cards (time&attendance with RFID, Legic/Mifare), digital identities and certificates is the main focus – one that I find to be most attractive as lifecycle management for cards and certificates has only recently be added to the functionality of the Identity Lifecycle Manager, property of Microsoft. Microsofts solution does lack the “physical” side though, and that is where the XML oriented middleware kicks in that IDpendant uses to get things together. Getting the RFID object out of the card and writing it to a field in the AD while creating a certificate through the CA at the same time AND getting the card layout printed to the blank card (personalization) is a pretty nice piece of integration work.

Now that Imprivata and Made4Biz are able to get the “attendance” part of the physical solutions as input for their authentication process. the “real integration” of the realms seems to be getting closer! Users can only log in to their workstations if they have previously swiped their access card – nice! Even if users share their passwords, misuse is countered through the deactivation of “absent employee users”.

Well, not all that shines is gold (uhh, german sayings…) – there are definitly flaws to that approach, but I see rising interest the topic…

Would love to hear from you guys – thoughts, comments?

PS: on a sidenote, Imprivatas “ProveID” concept is pretty cool – it actually provides IAM technology (authentication, that is) for applications without the
need to implement that for each app. Quite the idea behind our KCP vision of layered IAM – simply an authentication layer that pops up any time you need it!

Ok, nothing is more boring than yesterdays news, I guess!

Despite this oh so true statement, especially in the blogosphere, I would like to rant about SUN’s recent acquisition of VAAU, a small company that offers tools around role mining and role engineering as well as compliance.

I had the sincere pleasure to work with some of the VAAU EMEA people and found both their tools and their approach to be very exciting. SUN in Germany is also very excited – at least the SUN guys I talked to lately – and they are eager to put their new tools to work exclusively, bearing in mind that VAAU was open to most IAM vendors before and will now probably go exclusive with SUN ID Management solutions. I´d say this is quite a punch for the remaining bunch…

Same as SAP has to prove that their Maxware deal was worth the prize, SUN now has to make sure that the competitive advantage of exclusive access to VAAU technology can be supported with special ties and deeper integration with their IAM solutions. I intend to closely watch these guys next year, and probably have a chat or two with representatives of both sides! This is an invitation – but you know that, don´t you?

See you all soon

Sebastian