* Analysis of Oracle-Oblix combination on management arena
With Oracle’s acquisition of Oblix this past week, the world of identity management came a giant step closer to completing its consolidation with leading players in enterprise IT. This particular union, however, is one of the most significant to date, aligning a database and applications powerhouse with a leader in the extension of identity for the enterprise and beyond.
Despite the widespread adoption of the directory, databases have remained by far the leading repositories for a wide variety of enterprise information. For this reason, it had seemed curious that Oracle had not taken a bigger leap into the world of identity management – a world in which it would be expected to wield considerable influence.
Now that it has, it’s worth pondering the fact that HR owns the responsibility for corporate personnel information, while Oracle databases and applications dominate the management not only of corporate information of all kinds, but that of customers and partners as well.
In other words, between its own assets and those of PeopleSoft and Oblix, Oracle seems to have missed very few opportunities to own the largest sources of identity information anywhere. Just as significant for this acquisition may be the synergy between Oblix and Oracle in terms of applications – fertile territory for both companies.
For the management world, Oracle’s acquisition of Oblix now puts it on the same playing field with the four largest management vendors – IBM, HP, Computer Associates and BMC – all of whom now have a portfolio of the key identity technologies for access management, provisioning, audits and extranets. Indeed, the Oracle-Oblix announcement came only days after BMC filled a critical extranet gap with the acquisition of OpenNetwork. Some of these management investments have dominated the identity market, as with IBM’s Tivoli suite, and CA’s high-value acquisition of Netegrity. Others have been more quiet, but no less significant for what they can do for their owners, as with HP’s OpenView Select family of identity products.
These management leaders all have one thing in common: regardless of scale or impact, their identity products have become vital assets for staking out key strongholds for the future of management itself. Identity has become an essential technology for security and policy management, as well as for emerging service-oriented architectures, which are shaping the future of distributed applications. Federation concepts that are defining distributed identity will also become key enablers of management initiatives such as the configuration management database.
Though not unanticipated (Enterprise Management Associates has thought Oracle’s investment in Oblix to be highly likely for some time), Oracle’s entry into the wider world of identity will be disruptive regardless for these management leaders. The processes and enterprise applications owned by Oracle determine to a large extent just how identity appears in the enterprise. The union of Oracle and Oblix has the potential to move key aspects of the focus of identity away from management and middleware to identity sources and enterprise applications themselves.
Only an equally significant expansion of another major owner of a widely deployed source of identity – Microsoft and Active Directory – or the entry into the identity market of another industry giant with recently heightened enterprise aspirations – Symantec – would be expected to have a similar effect. Until then, Oracle has become today’s identity player to watch, for the effect it may have on defining how identity shapes IT both within and between enterprises.
