Tag: Identity Management

The ERM World is Getting Smaller: Sun to acquire Vaau

A second enterprise roles management company has been acquired.  Sun has announced intent to buy Vaau.  Congrats to Sachin, Steve Tiches, and the rest of the gang at Vaau.  You are definitely joining a great team.

It will interesting to see how fast Sun can tie Vaau’s various components to their existing suite.  I have to imagine that what was Identity Auditor, now part of Identity Manager, will be replaced entirely by Vaau’s identity audit capability.  Comparing Sun’s time to integrate Vaau to Oracle’s time to integrate Bridgestream ought to be interesting as well.

More coverage of Cisco and Securent

I think that Phil’s take on this sits somewhere in between Dave’s cynicism and Eric’s unabashed joy.

I do agree with Dave in that I doubt that this acquisition signals a market consolidation – the entitlement market is too new.  Look at the role management market as an example: it’s been around for a few years, lived longer than most expected, and just now are we seeing consolidation.

Identity Management and Photography

I love shooting without a flash. So does Bob and he just published a good public service announcement for shooting without using a flash. (I do like that second shot of Mike a lot.)

There are a bunch of people in the greater identity management world who would consider themselves amateur photographers. I wonder if there is commonality of photography and IdM that practitioners of both find compelling.

From a content perspective, the aspects of a picture I take that I really like are, in some sense, a reflection of me. Maybe this photo/IdM thing comes back to relationships. We are looking for ourselves in our subjects.

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Your network ate my fine-grained auth engine: Cisco to acquire Securent

Cisco has announced it has agreed to acquire Securent. First, of congrats to my friends there. Well done.

Second, I have to wonder about this one. It makes a form of sense to integrate Securent into SONA. That makes sense… at some point. I wonder how baked the addressable market is for fine-grained authorization capabilities managed from the network through the application stack. Abstracting routing tables to business processes and objects is definitely an interesting one, but when does it really transition from an interesting academic exercise into a Cisco-sized market?

Third, Andras Cser over at Forrester writes:

Given the fact that enterprises are increasingly looking for integrated IAM stacks, the entry of Cisco into the entitlement management market will require a clear strategy of becoming a provider of IAM solutions either through organic growth or by acquisition.

If Cisco is really getting into the IAM market, they picked a bit of an unusual beachhead. Entitlement management and fine-grained auth are emerging submarkets within IAM; they are important, but are significantly smaller markets than web access management, enterprise single sign-on, user provisioning, etc. If Cisco is that serious about tackling this market, it seems to me they would have started with a more mainstream, mature area.