Nishant, in a light hearted manner, took my post on Sun acquiring Vaau as a bit of a dare. This is how I responded to his comment:
Since I don’t believe that ERM is an end in and of itself, I am more curious where the market and technology will go now that two “suite” vendors have made acquisitions. If, by orchestrating some sort of challenge between Oracle and Sun to integrate and innovate, I can help move things along, then yes, by all means, consider it a challenge. Maybe the gang at Burton Group can referee this?
How vendors like Sun and Oracle integrate their ERM acquisitions will have a very tangible impact on the future direction of identity management. Both are in a position to unlock the true value of enterprise role management.
The step of integrating ERM in user provisioning is a no brainer, though it will be interesting to see how fast each vendor can do it. What is more interesting is the step beyond that. I started to ruminate on that before… guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes.
In the meantime, it would be great if someone like Kevin Kampman would weigh in on this.