In the past I’ve warned you about putting too much credence into publications such as Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” or Forrester’s “Wave.” Not that there’s bad research, but that your needs might not fit the profile the report was drawn for — better to pay the money and have an independent analyst do a report tailored to your situation.
Nevertheless, these reports can give us an indication, albeit a broad indication, of what’s going on in a particular market area. As a case in point, I recently read “The Forrester Wave: Role Management And Access Recertification, Q3 2011.” Access recertification is an important part of data governance. Forrester defines it as: “… managers periodically reviewing their employees’ access rights, also known as an identity audit.” They pointed out that fully implemented access recertification would have prevented Pfc. Bradley Manning from accumulating the rights which led to him being fingered for providing the documents in the recent WikiLeaks scandal, as well as preventing Jérôme Kerviel from acquiring all the rights he needed to precipitate the Société Générale debacle in which the banking firm lost more than €4.9 billion.
BACKGROUND: A Tale of Two Insiders
Forrester included eight vendors in the assessment: Aveksa, Bhold, CA Technologies, Courion, IBM, NetIQ, Oracle and SailPoint. After an extensive scoring exercise, three emerged on top: Aveksa, SailPoint and NetIQ.
Of these leaders, Forrester says:
• Aveksa built its Access Governance Platform with access recertification in mind.
• SailPoint’s IdentityIQ is the king of risk representation.
They’re also ranked very close. But about the third leader, Forrester says: “NetIQ will continue to OEM Aveksa’s leading access governance solution under the NetIQ Access Governance Suite (AGS) moniker …”
So, NetIQ is also using the highly rated Aveksa technology?
I have good friends at both Aveksa and SailPoint, and I certainly wouldn’t disparage either (and I can highly recommend each’s governance services). But if one company’s product holds down two of the top three places, I’ve got to award that company the win. So Aveksa noses out SailPoint in my mind.
If you’d like to check out the report for yourself, but you’re not a Forrester client, drop Aveksa’s Tedd Rodman a note and he’ll get you a copy.
