BMC Software this week plans to unveil three identity applications to help anchor a software suite it’s developing that lets corporations manage identities as part of security and regulatory compliance efforts.
The applications are part of a three-phase plan, to be completed next year, that BMC says it hopes will revive interest in its management platform; help it compete with the emerging group of identity-management suite vendors; and provide users with tools for regulatory compliance, identity allocation and management.
BMC is building its Identity Management Suite on the back of technology it acquired earlier this year when it bought Calendra for its provisioning technology and OpenNetwork for its Web access management software. BMC’s own Control-SA also is a foundation element of the suite.
This fall, BMC will introduce Compliance Manager, an auditing tool; Federated Identity Manager, to support the sharing of identities with partners; and Atrium Identity Discovery, which will be used to pump identity data into BMC’s Configuration Management Database. The three products comprise Phase 2 in BMC’s creation of an identity suite, which also includes tighter integration and Web-based management interfaces. Phase 1 is the current lineup of products, according to company officials. Phase 3 will focus on back-end integration, including directory management, a set of APIs and shared data stores across the suite.
“The devil will be in the implementation details,” says Roberta Witty, a research vice president at Gartner. “How long will it take to integrate everything into one product? One look and feel? Today, there is not that integrated view.”
BMC’s competitors are facing the same challenge – Computer Associates, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, RSA Security and Sun have all acquired identity companies to build suites of products that now must be integrated.
BMC has five areas it plans to focus on: directory management and visualization, access management, user administration and provisioning, password management, and audit and compliance management.
BMC says it plans to support a crop of identity standards including Security Assertion Markup Language; Service Provisioning Markup Language; Liberty Alliance specifications; and Shibboleth, the federated identity-management specifications for Internet2. BMC also is supporting emerging standards such as WS-Federation.
“BMC’s core product Control-SA is very functional, it has suffered from usability and flexibility concerns. A lot of what comes from Calendra addresses that, and they have been very aggressive with those capabilities,” says Jonathan Penn, an analyst at Forrester Research.
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