Before every major Apple event, a gaggle of rumor mills spin into action. From home media stations, to tablet devices, to spreadsheet applications, to Steve Jobs being declared iMaster of the Universe. Yup, everyone with a crazy idea for an Apple product makes their equally crazy predictions. But, there is definitely one announcement that they did not see coming. Ours.
Today we announced the public availability of our Identity Driver for Mac OSX. Granted, Steve wasn’t on stage talking about it, but we are going to work on that for next year. Okay, okay, so it isn’t an Apple product, but it does run on a Mac.
The rumor mills shouldn’t be ashamed about not anticipating our release. No one expects identity management news out of Macworld. Heck, people don’t expect identity management news about Apple at all. That doesn’t seem right to us. Macs in the enterprise are more and more common. And it’s not just the design staff and the cool people who have them; it’s regular people too.
We have customers with Macs in their enterprise. They wanted to be able to establish pervasive identity in their Mac communities just as they can with their Windows and Linux environments; they required a complete view of their world. Our customers asked and we delivered. And that was that… less getting some new Macs in the office and a bit of development work.
With all the regulatory and operational pressures of todays world, our customers realize that having an incomplete view of the enterprise is unacceptable. A partial audit will only keep your CFO partially out of jail, which gets the CIO partially fired and CEO partially indicted.
All said and done, I am glad we got Apple endorsed this press release. It demonstrates their commitment to enterprise customers. Identity management in the enterprise cannot have any gaps, no clump of disparates users of kinds of machines can be excluded. We are giving our customers complete vision into their enterprise and this new driver furthers our cause.