Before getting to my predictions for this coming year in identity management, let's take a look back at 2007 - including Oracle's identity shopping spree and the efforts by industry bodies to advance convergence and interoperability - and compare those activities to our expectations.

One thing I didn’t predict was an increase – or even a steady state – for the amount of consolidation via mergers and acquisitions within the industry. Yes, there were a few M&As but a lot fewer – with a lot less impact – than in the previous two years.

There was little movement on the acquisition front at all until mid-year when SAP snapped up MaXware, a company that had been on the market for a couple of years. We’re still scratching our heads as to what SAP is going to do with the acquired technologies - it certainly isn’t actively marketing them as standalone products, although there is now an “identity management” component of SAP’s NetWeaver suite, sold almost entirely to existing SAP clients.

A month or so later, Oracle made another move in its chess match with SAP (the two compete in the HR/ERM space) by acquiring Bharosa, whose strength is in context - or (as Bharosa calls it) risk-based authentication. This is now and will be for the near future a very hot area of the identity management spectrum. It was a solid move on Oracle’s part to further cement its lead as the identity management vendor with the most complete suite of products in-house.

Another month or so went by, and Oracle further secured its position by acquiring role-management specialist Bridgestream - thus filling what may have been the biggest hole left in its identity management spectrum.

Finally, entitlement management startup Securent was scooped up by Cisco for a whole boatload of money ($100 million). And we’re still trying to figure out why.

So there were no real blockbuster acquisitions in 2007, but Oracle did do some judicious shopping to fill in some real needs in its lineup.

The other major news for 2007 was a decided effort towards convergence, or at least greater interoperability, in the federation market. Spearheaded by the Liberty Alliance, with major impetus from Sun and IBM, it will soon be possible to federate with others regardless of the technologies they are using. That’s “soon” in computer-cooperation-speak, which I sometimes think means “before the end of this millennium.” But even that’s better than the “never” we were looking at just a few short years ago.