Gartner has just released another of its "Magic Quadrant" reports, this one on user provisioning services.

Every Magic Quadrant report carries, at the bottom, a disclaimer stating that it is: "a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the 'Leaders' quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose."

Of course, everyone wants to be in the "Leaders" quadrant and no vendor I know ever sent out a press release declaring that it made it into the Challengers, Visionaries or Niche Players quadrant! I bring this up because Oracle was quite proud (I know, because Oracle Vice President of Identity Management and Security Products Hassan Rizvi told me himself) to be listed in the Leaders quadrant for the provisioning report.

Rizvi called to update me on Oracle's progress at assimilating last year's acquisitions, Thor Technologies and OctetString. But it appears Gartner actually did Rizvi's work for him. In the Magic Quadrant report, Gartner says:

"Oracle bought into the IAM [identity and access management] market with acquisitions of Phaos (May 2004), Oblix (March 2005), Thor Technologies (December 2005) and OctetString (December 2005). In a short time, it has amassed a very strong management team and IAM technology portfolio. Adding its January 2005 PeopleSoft acquisition for HR management, Oracle is positioning itself to be the 'mover and shaker' in the IAM market. To date, Oracle is fulfilling on its strategy in delivering an integrated product suite. Its IAM road map looks the best of all vendors."

Only Sun and IBM/Tivoli are also present in the Leaders quadrant, with most of the other familiar names (Courion, Beta Systems, BMC Software, CA, Novell, M-Tech, HP, MaXware, nCipher, Siemens, Voelcker Informatik, Avatier, Fischer International, Sentillion and Microsoft) in the Challengers or Niche Players quadrants (there are no "Visionaries" in the list).

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.