In March of 2003, Dwayne Watson drove a tractor onto the National Mall. He stayed, sitting on his John Deere, in a small pool in Constitutional Gardens… for 2 days. Long story short SWAT team gets involved… blah, blah, blah… domestic terrorist… blah, blah,blah… caused lots of traffic in DC. And it is for that last point that he was sent to jail. You can read a more accurate portrayal of this in the Washington Post.
So RSA’s parent company, EMC has entered into agreement with Courion to offer Courion’s suite of products including:
This, as Ian Yip points out, does fill the gapping hole in the EMC/RSA identity management story left by Oracle purchasing Thor, RSA’s old user provisioning partner. The other side of this equation is that Courion has lacked a web access management tool. That is not to say that I think they truly needed one and I applaud Courion for sticking to their knitting and making a really great business/end-user focused suite. But that being said, they are in Gartner’s leadership quadrant for user provisioning with the big boys, all of whom have WAC/WAM capabilities. In a toe-to-toe fight against those guys I am sure there are cases where no having a WAM product has hurt them. (Although people proclaim the identity management suite dead or at least a non-issue, I have to imagine that there are still RFPs out there looking for the whole enchilada no matter how poorly integrated it might be.) This is the long way around to say that RSA Access Manager (Securant not to be confused with Securent - anyone else confused by this?) helps fill a hole in the Courion family of products. All in all if EMC were to actually buy Courion, it would be too surprising. At the very least, it wouldn’t increase employees’ commute to work too much…
A while back I had commented on consolidation in the role management world. As I have said before, from product management and marketing perspectives, integrating a role management tool into an existing identity management suite is a no-brainer. This is not to say that the implementation and deployment are no-brainers as well - so don’t get too excited Greg ;) What is more interesting is where major vendors like Oracle and Sun will take enterprise roles management.
I believe that using double quotes around a word or phrase negates the word or phrase that is quoted. Let me demonstrate:
From this list you may think that double quoting as negation only works for foodstuffs, but that is incorrect. People use air quotes to accomplish the same thing as well as a method for reinforcing a negation. For example:
This is a great summation of the points against our current, expensive, ineffective “security” at airports, written by a commercial airline pilot.
A hearty congrats to my friends and old co-workers at Tivoli on a job well done. ITIM 5.0 has been officially released! Having been part of the beta program, I can say that this is an amazing release. A great deal of thought and research has gone into ITIM 5.0 and in the bits I have seen, customers are really going to enjoy using it. Yes, I said enjoy. The new user interfaces are enjoyable to use. Amazing and true. Good work everyone.
My grandmother died last week. I was quite close to her. I was her first grandchild and thus a testbed for grandparenting. I have to say, she was an incredible person. A mathematician who worked on one of the first few computers ever built, she worked for the military during World War II. She raised three kids and was the matriarch for a large extended family.
But that is not exactly how I remember her. I remember her as the person that really introduced me to art and music. Taking me to both the MFA and Boston Symphony, she spoiled me with an informal education in the arts. (It is all the time I spent as a kid in Boston Symphony Hall that has made me so picky about the acoustics of the halls in which I hear classical music. Sorry, Kennedy Center, but you just can’t compete to the warmth and richness of the sound in Symphony Hall.) Later in life, she studied art history at Wellesley College and was a docent at its Davis Museum.
Nishant, in a light hearted manner, took my post on Sun acquiring Vaau as a bit of a dare. This is how I responded to his comment:
Since I don’t believe that ERM is an end in and of itself, I am more curious where the market and technology will go now that two “suite” vendors have made acquisitions. If, by orchestrating some sort of challenge between Oracle and Sun to integrate and innovate, I can help move things along, then yes, by all means, consider it a challenge. Maybe the gang at Burton Group can referee this?
A second enterprise roles management company has been acquired. Sun has announced intent to buy Vaau. Congrats to Sachin, Steve Tiches, and the rest of the gang at Vaau. You are definitely joining a great team. It will interesting to see how fast Sun can tie Vaau’s various components to their existing suite. I have to imagine that what was Identity Auditor, now part of Identity Manager, will be replaced entirely by Vaau’s identity audit capability. Comparing Sun’s time to integrate Vaau to Oracle’s time to integrate Bridgestream ought to be interesting as well.
I think that Phil’s take on this sits somewhere in between Dave’s cynicism and Eric’s unabashed joy. I do agree with Dave in that I doubt that this acquisition signals a market consolidation - the entitlement market is too new. Look at the role management market as an example: it’s been around for a few years, lived longer than most expected, and just now are we seeing consolidation.