Last issue I was musing about trends and “weddings” observed at the Catalyst conference, and this time I’ll bring up a wedding reception as well as a trendy niche in identity management.

The guys and girls from Waveset were last seen at Catalyst wearing sharks on their heads (see “Memorable moments from Catalyst 2003”) before heading off to relatively stodgy Sun. But now that they’ve re-emerged as Sailpoint Technologies, their rarely suppressed sense of humor has re-emerged. At Catalyst, they threw a wedding reception – complete with a “bride”, a “groom” and a wedding cake! As CEO Mark McClain put it, “We always try to overachieve in the creativity department!”

And overachieve is what the company may have to do to conquer the emerging niche it dubs Identity Risk Management and some others call Compliance Management, but which is being rolled into Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) management by some. Also part of the grouping is what some vendors are calling Entitlement Management, defined by one such vendor, Securent, as a method that “…enables organizations to administer, enforce, and audit fine-grained access policies across heterogeneous application and IT environments, all with centralized management and visibility. The significant time to market, security, compliance, and cost reduction benefits of [Entitlement Management] have been proven at many Fortune 500 customers.”

I don’t know what we’re eventually going to call this area of identity management. It is an outgrowth of the rush to implement regulatory compliance that we saw over the past couple of years, but now people want to reduce their costs while getting better automatic controls. Since being compliant also requires better security (i.e., risk management) and oversight (i.e., governance), while technologies such as role management and role-based access control can reduce costs while improving automation, I think we’re going to see some fluidity in this space for a while as more and more vendors seek to be part of what promises to be a required group of technologies for just about any business. There isn’t one, but numerous nascent trends here, and only time will tell which will emerge and which will disappear. We’ll keep watching.

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