A marriage, a hot couple, and a single looking for a date at Catalyst

The foundation for security and enterprise management

Something I always look for at each year’s Catalyst conference is trends. Not, I hasten to add, those artificial induced “trends” where the Burton Group decides what would be good to talk about and then arranges the presentations – those things can only become trends if we’re still talking about them six months later. No, I mean those things that crop up in hallway conversations, or in the activities of vendors and/or clients – activities that come as somewhat of a surprise to the vendor’s competitors that are making the same sort of announcement.

Here’s what I mean. Leading up to Catalyst, I told you about Fischer technology’s new strategy of marketing identity management as an outsourced service via application service providers. At Catalyst, Oracle announced an agreement with Wipro to market a new package of Managed Identity Services. At the tail end of the conference, identity vendor Mycroft and managed services provider Talisen Technologies announced a merger, to be called (very unimaginatively) Mycroft Talisen.

Three announcements, three different arrangements, three quite different identity vendors: Oracle, which is very high on the radar; Fischer which seems to always be listed, if not highlighted, in provisioning discussions; and Mycroft, which has had only had two mentions in this newsletter over the past five years and then only as a partner of another vendor I was talking about. Still, all three have been very active in the provisioning market and all three are now leading the “identity-management-as-a-service” niche.

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Something I always look for at each year’s Catalyst conference is trends. Not, I hasten to add, those artificial induced “trends” where the Burton Group decides what would be good to talk about and then arranges the presentations – those things can only become trends if we’re still talking about them six months later. No, I mean those things that crop up in hallway conversations, or in the activities of vendors and/or clients – activities that come as somewhat of a surprise to the vendor’s competitors that are making the same sort of announcement.

Here’s what I mean. Leading up to Catalyst, I told you about Fischer technology’s new strategy of marketing identity management as an outsourced service via application service providers. At Catalyst, Oracle announced an agreement with Wipro to market a new package of Managed Identity Services. At the tail end of the conference, identity vendor Mycroft and managed services provider Talisen Technologies announced a merger, to be called (very unimaginatively) Mycroft Talisen.

Three announcements, three different arrangements, three quite different identity vendors: Oracle, which is very high on the radar; Fischer which seems to always be listed, if not highlighted, in provisioning discussions; and Mycroft, which has had only had two mentions in this newsletter over the past five years and then only as a partner of another vendor I was talking about. Still, all three have been very active in the provisioning market and all three are now leading the “identity-management-as-a-service” niche.

The major difference is the approach the three identity vendors have taken: Mycroft went all out for a full-scale wedding; Oracle has committed to a, for now, exclusive dating arrangement (but won’t go as far as calling it an “engagement”); Fischer, though, appears to be willing to “date” any service provider who is interested. Only time will tell which is the better strategy – or even if the trend itself is viable. Let’s see what those folks are talking about next year.

Wedding plans also figured prominently in the activities of another “hot niche” vendor, and I’ll talk about that “trendy” (if not yet a trend) segment next time.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.

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