* Independence is the by-word in some identity management circles
I said that the recent Catalyst Conference held few new initiatives and no surprises. But there was one thing that struck me as surprising – the lack of merger and acquisition announcements.
At the beginning of this year I suggested that the rash of M&A activity would continue throughout 2006 as niche product vendors feel the pressure to allow themselves to be acquired by the major players that need to be present full and complete identity management offerings. But I realized during the week at Catalyst that there are at least two niche areas (and most likely three) where consolidation isn’t about to happen.
The first area is virtual directories. In the wake of Oracle’s acquisition of OctetString last fall, it might have been expected that the other virtual directory providers (Radiant Logic, MaXware, SymLabs, et al) would be courted by Oracle’s competitors. That hasn’t happened. A quick look at the technology partners of each (Radiant’s partners, MaXware’s partners, SymLab’s partners) reveals a great deal of overlap.
Major identity vendors (IBM, Sun, HP, CA, etc.) aren’t ready to choose and prefer their customers choose. Any of the virtual directory join engine technologies can work with any of the provisioning companies’ workflow engines with little need to modify or change anything. There’s no incentive for these big vendors to choose one and risk alienating customers who would prefer another.
The second area is simplified sign-on (also known as single sign-on or SSO). Passlogix was the technology pioneer in this area, starting 10 years ago. Back then the term “identity management” hadn’t been used at all. But security vendors liked the idea of a technology used to hold all of the authentication credentials of a user – rather than using a sticky note attached to the monitor on the user’s desktop! Everyone partnered with Passlogix as it became the Citrix of authentication (Citrix, of course, dominates the market for remote access technologies but also partners with Passlogix for SSO within that market).
There are certainly others in the SSO space – ActivIdentity and Imprivata just to name two others – but two of the major identity management suppliers, IBM and Novell, do not have their own solution, preferring to use Passlogix. Why? Passlogix would probably carry too high a price tag to acquire (there would be a bidding war), developing SSO in-house would not be cost effective given Passlogix’s long experience in the field and acquiring one of the newer SSO vendors might alienate existing customers.
Then there’s that third niche area, in one of identity management hottest niches. We’ll go into that one in the next issue.
