Gartner spotlights market leaders

It's October, time (in the Northern Hemisphere) for apples, cider and hay rides. It's also time for Halloween and Gartner Magic Quadrants (MQ). Not sure which is scarier!

Today we'll look at the Provisioning MQ. It's available to Gartner clients and is also available through some of the vendors mentioned (CA, for example, has it here.)  

It's a 50-plus page report, so we can only skim the highlights here. As a reminder, MQs break down the marketplace into four areas:

* Leaders -- High-momentum vendors (based on sales, world presence and mind share growth) with evident track records in user provisioning across most, if not all, market segments.

* Challengers -- Have solid, reliable products that address the needs of the user-provisioning market with strong sales, visibility and clout that add up to higher execution than niche players. 

* Visionaries -- Are distinguished by technical and/or product innovation, but have not yet achieved the record of execution in the user-provisioning market to give them the high visibility of leaders, or they lack the corporate resources of challengers."

* Niche players -- Offer viable, dependable solutions that meet the needs of buyers, especially in a particular industry, platform focus or geographic region, but they sometimes lack the comprehensive features of leaders, or the market presence and/or resources of challengers. 

Now there's nothing inherently bad about being in any of these sectors but, somehow, the Leaders quadrant (perhaps because of the name, perhaps because on the "graph" -- it's the upper right-hand quadrant) is the one getting all the attention. People looking to rely on this report to guide them in making a decision about a vendor, though, should read the entire report (and any of the vendors mentioned can get you a copy), which points out the strengths, weaknesses and trends of each. As the document points out: "Leaders should not be default choices for every buyer; rather, clients are warned not to assume that they should buy only from the Leaders quadrant."

That said, here's the lineup for this year:

* Leaders -- Courion, Oracle, IBM Tivoli, Novell, CA and Sun

* Challengers -- Hitachi ID, Siemens, Beta Systems, BMC, Avatier and Microsoft

* Visionaries -- Sentillion, Fischer International and Volcker Informatik

* Niche Players -- Omada, Quest Software, SAP, Evidian and Ilex

Gartner also noted four companies to watch. They didn't make the list this year, but seem poised to do so in the near future:

* Econet -- Entered (in 2006) the user-provisioning market with cMatrix, a service-oriented offering targeted at service providers primarily in EMEA.

* FoxT -- A company with products that focus primarily on access control and service account management. However, its BoKS Access Control for Applications addresses basic provisioning.

* Imanami -- A lesser-known company, but it has some notable clients including AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless) and Mervyns.

* Institut fur System-Management -- iSM (as it's known) is a small company focused on German-speaking country markets with its bi-Cube product for provisioning, SSO, and process and role life-cycle management.

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