* ID mgmt. vendors begin year with consolidation
In the last issue, I presented some predictions for the New Year from Thor Technology’s Alberto Yépez and OctetString’s Clayton Donley. Little did I know that one of the predictions would begin to come true before you had the chance to read the words.
Yépez’ third prediction was that “Consolidation in the marketplace will continue,” which was right in line with my Network World prediction (see https://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2005/011005kearns.html). Barely half way through the first month of the year and we’ve already had two merger/acquisition announcements in the identity management space.
The first move, chronologically, was IBM’s acquisition of SRD, a privately held developer of identity resolution software based in Las Vegas. Following very close on the heels of this announcement was word that BMC had made a purchase. In the superlablurb (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2004/0823id2.html) language of the press release: “BMC Software, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise management solutions, today announced its intent to acquire privately held Calendra, the leading provider of Web-based business-oriented identity management solutions.”
SRD, the company acquired by IBM, occupies a somewhat different niche in identity management than the companies usually mentioned here. Its specialty is “identity intelligence,” a form of data mining. In her story about the acquisition, Network World Senior Editor, Ann Bednarz describes SRD’s product as “…analytics software that specializes in gleaning information about individuals’ identities and discovering obscure associations – for example drawing links between someone who is bouncing checks at five different banks using five different identities.” The software was originally developed for use by the casino industry in Nevada and is referred to as a Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA) application. It will be interesting to see what use IBM will make of this.
BMC is more likely to be seen in my Windows Networking newsletter than here, as it specializes in management software (BMC Control-D, Control-M, Control-SA, etc.). Control-SA is about user management, though, cross platform user management in fact. So the acquisition of Calendra makes a lot of sense as that company was trying to carve out a niche in the “management of identity management” area. I had a good conversation with Calendra’s then Chief Marketing Officer Gregoire Michel and Marketing Vice President Annette Hagood on that topic and which I talked about in two newsletters at the time (see links below). This should be a good fit.
There are lots more mergers and acquisitions to come, and more I can say about predictions. But that’s enough for today.
