* Identity management in 2005
What will the New Year bring for identity management? Through my New Year’s resolutions in last week’s newsletter, I suggested what ought to happen but today I’d like to consider what might actually happen, and I’ve two “guest prognosticators” to share the burden.
The first prediction is my own, and you’ll find it in this week’s Wired Windows column in Network World (https://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2005/011005kearns.html). I predicted that as the economy picks up so too will mergers and acquisitions – particularly in the identity management arena. I believe that half dozen well-known identity management companies would be assimilated this year.
OctetString founder and CTO Clayton Donley told me that in 2005, he expects the scope and scale of virtual directory projects to increase significantly as more customers, analysts, and integrators realize that virtual directories, to coin a phrase, “…really do put the service back into directory services.” Now OctetString is a virtual directory company, but Donley has always been honest with me (and you) – he once spent 20 minutes trying to convince me that metadirectories could be every bit as useful as virtual ones.
Thor Technologies CEO Alberto Yépez was also willing to step up to the plate and deliver a fearless forecast for the New Year. He came up with four predictions:
1.) Compliance automation will continue to grow in relative importance as a business driver for identity management implementations.
2.) Each major platform vendor will continue to bake more robust identity management capability into each of their core platforms.
3.) Consolidation in the marketplace will continue.
4.) Provisioning functionality will become increasingly important as a catalyst for federated identity management deployments.
Nothing outrageous there, nothing I can disagree with but each presents us with a different set of opportunities (both the good and the bad kind).
In the next couple of issues I’ll take a closer look at all of these predictions and see what they made presage. Drop me a note with your fearless forecast and I’ll incorporate some of those ideas, too.
