IBM's identity management becomes user-centric: HP's identity management exit strategy
Courtesy of InternetNews on Tuesday I learned that IBM has added support for OpenID, Windows CardSpace and Eclipse's Higgins Identity Framework to its Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (FIM) offering. As one of the enterprise identity management heavyweights, IBM's announcement is an important endorsement of user-centric identity approaches. Such approaches are still in the formative phase of the adoption curve, particularly in the enterprise, so I see this is an investment for the future for IBM. IBM's significant installed base should help to increase awareness, particularly for organisations supporting external user communities.
IBM's
press release provides more details on the user-centric credentials (
no pun intended!) of FIM. It also discusses the product's SOA Identity Service, which is designed to address some of the challenges associated with identity lifecycle management and audit where service-oriented approaches are applied to siloed applications with siloed security. These challenges are something
I highlighted back in February 2006 and are a barrier to the realisation of the value of SOA as it moves out of project-level deployments. I see the SOA Identity Service as the more important aspect of this announcement, with SOA being a more pressing IT (and hopefully business) concern than user-centric identity.
As an aside, the InternetNews article mentions that the enterprise identity management market
is becoming increasingly competitive with offerings from HP, CA and Oracle.
Can't fault the journalist on CA and Oracle ... but HP! Earlier in the year the company announced that it was no longer going to be selling its Identity Center products to new customers: hardly a competitive force. As part of this (hopefully for its customers) graceful retreat from the market,
HP announced that it has established an exclusive agreement with Novell whereby the two companies will
jointly offer migration services, HP will resell Novell identity and security management solutions and Novell will license HP Identity Center technology
When HP originally announced that it was exiting the market, it stated that it would continue to support and develop Identity Center for its existing customers so I was somewhat surprised to see it offering a migration programme. I wonder whether those customers didn't see this as an effective way forward for what is critical infrastructure. Whilst the programme was a surprise, the partner wasn't. Where else could HP have gone? BMC, CA or IBM: hardly, given the competition in the IT service/systems management markets (and numerous others in the case of IBM). Sun: difficult given competition in the hardware space. Oracle: would have made things difficult for HP's SAP alliance team. Microsoft: lacks the heterogeneous environment support and breadth of functionality that HP's customers need. So, whilst I am sure the sentiments behind Ben Horowitz's (VP and GM, Business Technology Optimization, Software, HP) statement that HP chose Novell
because of its outstanding set of technologies, recognized market leadership and tremendous commitment to working with HP customers
are real, the company didn't have too many others to chose from!
Labels: BMC, CA, CardSpace, Eclipse, Higgins, HP, ibm, identity, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle
BEA announces strategic partnerhsip with CA: but where does that leave AquaLogic Enterprise Security?
BEA today
announced a stategic partnership with CA, which will see the latter's access and identity management solutions (SiteMinder and Identity Manager) integrated with the former's WebLogic and AquaLogic application and service infrastructure platforms.
I agree completely with Wai Wong's (BEA's executive vice president of products) statement in the press release that
Identity and Access Management is critical within SOA
not least because we have said as much in our
service infrastructure assessment model and our report on
identity management.
Despite this agreement, I am still left a tad confused by this partnership as it is far from clear what this means for
AquaLogic Enterprise Security (ALES), which BEA describes as
a fine-grained entitlement management solution that combines centralized policy management with distributed policy decision-making and enforcement. This combination provides management and control of your critical applicationsHow will SiteMinder integrate with ALES? Will ALES continue to integrate with other identity and access management solutions? Does BEA plan to provide a common policy definition and enforcement framework across ALES and SiteMinder?
We point out in our assessment of BEA's
service infrastructure offerings that there are some important gaps when it comes to security and identity management, which explains why BEA felt the need to establish this partnership. However, as well as answering a number of questions from potential adopters, this partnership is going to raise a few more for existing customers with an investment in ALES. I for one look forward to learning more about the two companies' plans to
validate and further extend integration between CA SiteMinder and BEA WebLogic and AquaLogic technologies
Labels: BEA, CA, identity, SOA
