* A look at Fischer International
When I told you about Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report on provisioning systems a couple of weeks ago, there were a few companies listed that haven’t been discussed in this newsletter in the past. I hope to change that over the next few weeks by drawing attention to them. Today, we’ll look at Fischer International.
Fischer announced a new version of its Identity Suite (V2.3) on May 16. The company touts features that it considers to be exclusive to its product, including a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-compliant identity management architecture, ETL (extract, transform and load) integration technology, and what it calls “the industry’s most powerful data mapper” as a way to simplify the traditionally complex, costly, and time consuming tasks of identity administration and user provisioning.
Chief Marketing Officer Dennis McDermott, in an e-mail conversation, pointed proudly to a recent Fischer customer deployment of phase 1 of an identity management project (provisioning and password reset). The first phase was completed in less than 90 days without any programming or outside services. The team consisted of one part-time project manager, one business analyst, and one member of the IT staff (non-programmer). That does sound like “ease of use”!
I recently came across a slide show prepared by Fischer for presentation at Coppin State University that highlights the company’s areas of expertise as well as its products with an emphasis on password management and provisioning. I was particularly taken with a slide called “Critical Success Factors” which bulleted:
* Identify the Right Goals.
* Look for Biggest Bang First.
* Take a Phased Approach.
* Buying Criteria: Take the Long View.
* Look at the Business Process – Not the Pain.
* Simple is Good. (TCO)
That’s important for any identity management project!
Fischer will be exhibiting at the upcoming Catalyst conference, a good place to get to know the company better.
*** I spent some time on the phone with Eurekify founder Ron Rymon recently, a conversation I’ll be writing more about soon, but I wanted to mention that there’s a new Eurekify survey up to gauge your thoughts on deploying role-based identity management. Take the survey, then watch here for the results in a month or so.
