End of BMC's .Net Identity Management suite highlights stink with Microsoft, partners

BMC has killed its .Net Identity Management product suite in part because partner Microsoft is squeezing BMC out with development of its own identity software, according to an internal Microsoft memo.

BMC in early May quietly ended investment and development in the .Net Identity Management suite with the current version 5.2 being the final edition. Planned enhancements, such as support for the Service Provisioning Markup Language, have also been killed.

The details were revealed in a memo Microsoft sent late Wednesday to an internal e-mail distribution list.

BMC .Net Identity Management is a suite of identity management tools, such as access control, provisioning, workflow, single sign-on and user self-service, that run on top of Microsoft’s Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007 (formerly called Microsoft Identity Information Server).

The memo highlights a growing rift between Microsoft and its partners that develop identity management software for the Windows platform. Like BMC, Omada’s identity software requires the use of ILM, while Quest and NetPro list ILM as a platform option.

BMC has a similar Java-based identity management suite it will continue to sell in competition against Microsoft and others such as IBM.

The rift centers on ILM 2007, which is expanding to offer similar tools to BMC and others. It is ILM, which offers synchronization, provisioning and management tools, that led BMC to kill is Windows-based identity platform, according to the memo.

The memo also cited features such as password management, password synchronization and self-service coming in ILM 2.0, slated to go into beta in mid-2007, that contributed to BMC’s decision.

In the memo Microsoft said, “[BMC’s] decision was driven by the fact that Microsoft’s announcement of ILM “2” and subsequent launch of ILM 2007 has led to significant feature overlap with BMC’s NET suite, both now and in the future.”

Neither BMC nor Microsoft returned e-mails seeking comment for this story.

“Microsoft has made a very stated point that they are going to come out and solve a number of identity problems that their partners have been solving for more than five years now,” said one recipient of the memo who wished to remain anonymous.

Those solutions include ILM 2.0 and auditing and reporting capabilities being built into Microsoft’s emerging System Center management platform.

“It doesn’t do Microsoft any good when they start building software that their customers have been making a viable market around for a number of years,” said the recipient.

The recipient said that from an end-user stand point, Microsoft has not had depth or breadth or market strength in its identity infrastructure, specifically access management and provisioning, so the support from third-party partners has become vital.

BMC’s pull-out leaves holes in Microsoft’s identity platform since BMC was the only vendor providing connectors to non-Microsoft Web platforms such as BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere.

While some experts say Microsoft has not been a model partner to third-party vendors in the identity space, they say that BMC also represented the weakest link among its identity partners.