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A hearty congrats to my friends and old co-workers at Tivoli on a job well done. ITIM 5.0 has been officially released! Having been part of the beta program, I can say that this is an amazing release. A great deal of thought and research has gone into ITIM 5.0 and in the bits I have seen, customers are really going to enjoy using it. Yes, I said enjoy. The new user interfaces are enjoyable to use. Amazing and true. Good work everyone. I love customer deployment stories. I especially love hearing about vendors deploying their own products. In this case, Sun and Deloitte were talking about deploying Sun Identity Manager internally at Sun. They covered the usual tips for a successful deployment:
Pretty standard stuff that always bear repeating.
The idea of getting the complex system vendor involved in the provisioning project strikes me as both novel and extremely effective. The nuances of complex systems like ERP and mainframe security can bedevil a provisioning project. Might as well go to the experts early. Their last point on planning for sustaining the project echoes a point the Phil Becker and I made last year on identity management as a lifestyle and not a project. You’re going to live with you decision for a lot longer than you probably expect. You have to plan on how to sustain the deployment and turn it into a key thread in the fabric of business services the organization relies upon. Deloitte speaking across all of their deployments, not just Sun’s, had some interesting observations as well: Part two of my three part series on Audit Trail. On one hand I can’t say I am that surprised. SAP has been itching to get into the IdM market. There was speculation that they were going to build their own. It is interesting to see that they have chosen, as many others have, to buy instead. I am, however, a little surprised in who SAP purchased. MaXware was known, primarily, as one of the three major meta/virtual directory companies out there. Maybe SAP saw wisdom in Oracle buying OctetString? (I’d be feeling pretty lonely right now if I was Radiant Logic.) Maybe SAP really just needed the connectivity that MaXware could provide? I wonder what this means for corporate SAP partners who are already in the identity management space? If I am a provisioning vendor who has spent resources developing integration to SAP and the Virsa bits, I am going to be pretty annoyed that SAP just bought a provisioning technology. Integration partner one day, direct competitor another. The real reason SAP made this move is the continuing SAP – Oracle War. SAP needs to be able to check the boxes off in an RFP that they have provisioning and identity management services. If SAP is looking to even the playing field, there’s at least one more acquisitions they have to do. They need to buy a large services company likes of Accenture or Booz Allen Hamilton. Granted, doing that will agitate their service partners, but that being said, it would round off SAP and enable them to go toe-to-toe with Oracle. Matt Kelly at Compliance Week threw out a line recently:
Needless to say, I am very curious what people will share on this subject. I’m always fascinated to hear how people apply user provisioning tools. Back in the day there were two major selling points for user provisioning: compliance and reduced help desk call volume. Customers were quick(er) to recognize the reduced help desk call volume but the compliance aspect lagged, mostly dueto the fact that no one knew what compliance meant. (These were the pre-SOX days mind you.) Times have certainly changed as has the messaging. Recently provisioning for compliance has morphed into compliant provisioning. User provisioning systems have matured to a point that organizations can use them as service platforms. Organizations are realizing that their provisioning infrastructures are great vehicles for other services: password management, role lifecycle management, and so on. Compliant provisioning is one of the best examples of this. If our recent webinar with KPMG and IBM was any indication, then the market is desperate for compliant provisioning solutions. We had hundreds of attendees asking some very tough questions about implementation, architecture, and resources needed. I can’t wait to see if Matt’s research reaffirms what we are seeing in the ever maturing provisioning market. |
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