Filling the holes: thoughts on an EMC/Courion combo

So RSA’s parent company, EMC has entered into agreement with Courion to offer Courion’s suite of products including:

  • PasswordCourier – password management
  • AccountCourier – user provisioning
  • RoleCourier – role engineering and management
  • ComplianceCourier – policy verification and self-assessment

This, as Ian Yip points out, does fill the gapping hole in the EMC/RSA identity management story left by Oracle purchasing Thor, RSA’s old user provisioning partner.

The other side of this equation is that Courion has lacked a web access management tool.  That is not to say that I think they truly needed one and I applaud Courion for sticking to their knitting and making a really great business/end-user focused suite.  But that being said, they are in Gartner’s leadership quadrant for user provisioning with the big boys, all of whom have WAC/WAM capabilities.  In a toe-to-toe fight against those guys I am sure there are cases where no having a WAM product has hurt them.  (Although people proclaim the identity management suite dead or at least a non-issue, I have to imagine that there are still RFPs out there looking for the whole enchilada no matter how poorly integrated it might be.)  This is the long way around to say that RSA Access Manager (Securant not to be confused with Securent – anyone else confused by this?) helps fill a hole in the Courion family of products.

All in all if EMC were to actually buy Courion, it would be too surprising.  At the very least, it wouldn’t increase employees’ commute to work too much…