Sailpoint, Aveksa announce offerings at Gartner Summit

Last week I put in a brief appearance at the Gartner Group's Identity and Access Management Summit in San Diego. This is a conference I've had few good things to say about in the past (and which Gartner Vice President Ray Wagner reminded me about this time) but it does serve a useful purpose. The conference content is geared towards its attendees who aren't necessarily IdM geeks or even security wonks. It attracts a more business-side oriented clientele and these are people who need to learn about IdM/IAM even if they have to be spoon-fed.

Fortunately for those who have heard it before there were a couple of announcements that were interesting.

First up, my friends at Sailpoint Technologies launched version 4 of their Identity IQ product. While there are some new technology features, Sailpoint President Kevin Cunningham wanted to emphasize to me that the spotlight should be on the new "collaborative compliance" features that give enterprises the ability to model business processes as well as manage individuals and groups responsible for identity governance activities. His point was that collaborative compliance fosters better teamwork across an organization by synchronizing identity business processes with IT controls, thus ensuring an organization is in compliance with corporate security policies and industry regulations. The Gartner event was certainly the right place to launch this one, and the feature should allow Sailpoint to sufficiently differentiate themselves from the competition.

Keeping up with them (in version number) was Aveksa, which announced the Aveksa 4.0 Enterprise Access Governance Platform. This is a suite comprising:

* Aveksa Access Request and Change Manager, which combines a business-centric user interface and a streamlined request and fulfillment process with embedded policy controls to ensure that access is appropriate.

* Aveksa Compliance Manager, which automates the monitoring, certification, reporting and remediation of user entitlements. 

* Aveksa Role Manager, which enables role discovery, modeling and maintenance.

In keeping with the locale of the announcement (dare I say the "context"?), PR maven Dave McKee emphasized that this release featured an "Intuitive, Business-friendly User Interface" (he's in PR, he speaks in capitalized words).

Gartner's IAM Summit is a good conference for its target market. As I said a couple of years ago: "It isn't a conference that you, the identity management expert, should go to -- at least not alone. This is really geared more to the line-of-business manager who needs to get a handle on this ‘identity stuff.' " Keep that in mind.

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