ian glazer's tuesdaynight

I love shooting without a flash. So does Bob and he just published a good public service announcement for shooting without using a flash. (I do like that second shot of Mike a lot.) There are a bunch of people in the greater identity management world who would consider themselves amateur photographers. I wonder if there is commonality of photography and IdM that practitioners of both find compelling. From a content perspective, the aspects of a picture I take that I really like are, in some sense, a reflection of me. Maybe this photo/IdM thing comes back to relationships. We are looking for ourselves in our subjects.

Cisco has announced it has agreed to acquire Securent. First, of congrats to my friends there. Well done. Second, I have to wonder about this one. It makes a form of sense to integrate Securent into SONA. That makes sense… at some point. I wonder how baked the addressable market is for fine-grained authorization capabilities managed from the network through the application stack. Abstracting routing tables to business processes and objects is definitely an interesting one, but when does it really transition from an interesting academic exercise into a Cisco-sized market? Third, Andras Cser over at Forrester writes:

The following was the response my friend David wrote to an invite I sent:

my social life consists of wondering why i babel to myself in the morning when i shave… when i forget to shave, i’m lonely… i don’t know what i’m doing past five today… other than having a cocktail… hope i see you both

I try to cultivate relationships with people like this…

I have now seen the Sox win the World Series twice. (I also saw Bill Buckner do his thing as well. Yin and yang.) Can I still claim to be a “long suffering” Red Sox fan? Now that we’ve won twice in four years, what does this mean for the Sox Nation? If we cannot define ourselves using our suffering, our endless series of broken hearts, how can we define ourselves?

Lori Rowland has posted an examination of the state of market given Oracle’s acquisition of LogicalApps. Her analysis of the impact of this acquisition to us independent controls management companies mirrors some of my thoughts on the matter. There was one thing that caught my eye. Lori writes:

There are obvious benefits to implementing Oracle and SAP’s controls management solutions to manage the respective environments. Who knows SAP SOD policies or sensitive transactions better than SAP, right?

(The following is also available over at Approva’s Audit Trail.) The deal has been announced and will finally be done in November. Nobody is particularly surprised that Oracle is buying LogicalApps, least of all, us here at Approva. With this transaction Oracle will now have a controls automation tool needed to continue its fight with SAP. Analysts, bloggers, and prospective customers have asked: where does this leave Approva and the answer is - exactly where we want to be: Approva remains the independent controls monitoring company – and the only one with the proven ability to work across applications, in multiple platforms and for any kind of control. Oracle (and similarly SAP) are taking the approach of strongly tying and embedding their controls monitoring tools in their ERP packages. What’s wrong with this approach? It is fundamentally too limited in scope and vision. Yes, managing controls in ERP systems is critical, especially in a SOX world. But, a tool that scopes controls automation down to SoD analysis for a specific ERP package (and, for that matter, a specific version therein) can only provide a keyhole view and doesn’t truly serve the GRC needs of the enterprise. Since LogicalApps only addressed Oracle E-Business Suite, with this acquisition Oracle continues to neglect its red haired step children: PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Siebel… where’s the controls love for them? To say that governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is an ill-defined piece of buzzword bingo may be the understatement of the last few years. If someone says they have a complete GRC platform to meet all enterprise needs, kindly escort them out of the building via the nearest window. The point is that we, vendors, service providers, and customers, are still feeling out what truly needs to be in a complete GRC solution set and over time “GRC” will continue to evolve before it solidifies into a commonly accepted set of capabilities. Accepting this limited definition of controls automation that ERP vendors are serving up will cost their customers and force them to reinvest over time. By definition, a constrained, embedded approach to controls automation is shortsighted. It cannot meet the future needs of GRC because it cannot adapt to other systems and other processes that will eventually fall under the controls monitoring umbrella. Approva’s approach has been and will continue to be fundamentally different. By staying independent and ERP agnostic, while at the same time providing rich domain expertise in those ERP packages, we provide customers better controls monitoring capabilities than the ERP vendors. We do this not only in these ERP applications, but we also provide the ability to do so in any application. Furthermore, we do this for any kind of automate-able control, be it traditional authorization-related segregation of duty or any kind of business process that our customers and business partners dream up. And we do all of this without the premium or baggage associated with ERP vendors. Freedom to monitor any kind of control. Freedom to leverage our deep domain expertise as well as that of our partners in the audit world. Yep, staying independent is all about freedom for Approva and it is this freedom we give to our customers – even Oracle’s red haired step kids. I may not know what the final definition of GRC will be, but I do know that Approva’s independent approach to controls monitoring will serve its customers better than any controls monitoring tool shackled to just a single ERP package.

Question: What is business traveler’s slavish devotion to hotel and airline point systems?

I love customer deployment stories. I especially love hearing about vendors deploying their own products. In this case, Sun and Deloitte were talking about deploying Sun Identity Manager internally at Sun. They covered the usual tips for a successful deployment:

• Involve the business
• Planning makes all the difference
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew

Pretty standard stuff that always bear repeating. There were some very interesting other observations:

It’s day one of Digital ID World 2007. This is my third or fourth trip to DIDW. This ever-growing event always impresses with the level and quality of conversation. During the keynotes this morning, I got a glimpse of something small and to me something quite telling. I saw Phil Becker and Eric Norlin, the brains and brawn (I’ll let you figure out which one is which), sitting on the floor off to the side of the packed meeting room. These guys have always put the emphasis on hearing real world deployment stories and in doing so have always elevated their audiences to active participants. To see the heads of the conference sitting on the floor to allow more attendees to have a place to sit is, to me at least, a sign of their character - totally legit.

The final installment of my series on compliant provisioning is up on Audit Trail. For those of you headed to Digital ID World, let me know and we can catch up. (I’m looking at you members of the Mark MacAuley supper club.)