... you're waiting for an identity management acquisition and then along come three at once. This time it's IBM which has acquired 40-person, privately-held Encentuate. If you think that Ecentuate's size is indicative of gap-filling motivations from IBM then you'd be right. The 7-year old company is a specialist in enterprise single sign-on (ESSO), which until now has been provided through IBM's OEM relationship with Passlogix. Clearly, owning rather than OEMing technology gives IBM greater control of its ESSO destiny - particularly as Encetuate is Java-based which should help with integration with the broader Tivoli identity management portfolio. In fact, during the announcement briefing the two companies explained how Tivoli Identity Manager is already able to manage Encentuate provisioning (although there are no production customer deployments). This is presumably the result of work that IBM Global Services did with Encentuate at the Singapore Government: the two companies weren't technology partners.

Having said this is largely about filling gaps in the IBM identity management portfolio, Encentuate does bring more than ESSO to the IBM table. The company has done a good job of integrating with a variety of strong authentication solutions and has a rather nifty ability to take physical access tokens (door swipes and so forth) so that they can be used as second authentication factors. Encentuate also has some neat audit and compliance capabilities which IBM will undoubtedly tie into the Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager (based on the acquisition of Consul in late 2006). In addition to the technology upside, Encentuate could also help IBM in the healthcare market, where smaller players such as Imprivata and Sentillion have done quite well: there's a good smattering of healthcare customers amongst Encentuate's 80.

Overall a smart acquisition by IBM. I am not so sure whether IBM's Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-on customers will be quite so happy though. The company has committed to continued support but the next iteration of the product is going to shift from Passlogix to Encentuate. IBM will make it attractive for them to move but replacing identity and security solutions is, by definition, a risky business and I am sure they will have to carefully balance the risks of moving against those associated with sticking with a product which is not going to see further development.

I have just returned from a couple of days in Orlando, where I attended a Microsoft Server and Tools Business analyst summit which coincided with the company's TechEd conference. The RedMonkers James and Coté did a great job of live blogging the event (here, here, here, here, here and here) - and there was even some Twittering - but I needed the joys of a 9 hour transatlantic flight to collect my thoughts.

The big news at TechEd and the focus of the analyst summit was Microsoft's Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business (Dynamic IT) strategy, which the company describes as building

on the company?s Dynamic Systems Initiative and ongoing Application Platform efforts to provide customers with the key areas of technical innovation necessary to make their IT and development organizations more strategic to the business

In other words it's a framework which builds on a number of Microsoft's most significant, but historically largely disconnected, initiatives which is designed to help customers understand how they can be combined to increase the business value of IT. This is long overdue, for a couple of reasons.

First, whilst Microsoft has used language in the past which implies linkage between the different initiatives and associated products, such as 'design for operations' for DSI and .NET, it's not always been clear how the implication becomes reality. For example, how do the System Center management tools exploit operational policy requirements defined in Visual Studio and how do those requirements map to policies defined in Windows Communication Foundation? Dynamic IT sets out to make the linkage explicit.

Second, Microsoft has lacked a cross-company vision for enterprise IT (for want of a better term) within which to frame discussions with customers and around which it can rally the troops. I'm thinking here of things like IBM's On Demand, HP's Business Technology, Oracle's Fusion etc. There's People-Ready of course but I think that's about more than Enterprise IT. Dynamic IT provides Microsoft with a competitive alternative and one that is more reflective of current reality than future aspiration.

There are four aspects to Dynamic IT where Microsoft plans to focus innovation:

• unified and virtualized
• process-led, model-driven
• service-enabled
• user-focused

built on a federated, interoperable and secure foundation. Obviously, it's still very early days but I do think Microsoft has a lot of work to do if it's going to achieve what I believe it hopes to with Dynamic IT.

For example, in his keynote when Bob Muglia talked about process-led, model-driven he discussed process-led in terms of the application lifecycle, BizTalk, Windows Workflow Foundation and Office Business Applications and model-driven in terms of System Center and IT management models (based on Service Modelling Language and the Common Model Library). What he didn't do was explain the relationship between the two. When describing service-enabled, he focussed on .NET, SOA, web services and software plus services, primarily from the bottom-up, developer perspective (consistent with Microsoft's initial foray into SOA) but failed to tie that into the end-to-end service lifecycle - Big SOA - and thus process-led, model-driven. (As an aside, I think Microsoft is also missing a trick when it comes to information and data as a service but that's for another day).

As well as explaining the relationships between the different aspects of Dynamic IT, Microsoft also has to be very careful that it doesn't fall back into the trap of using it simply as a framework for categorising its products. Increasingly, the key concerns of the people it is trying to reach with Dynamic IT don't fall into neat product categories and Microsoft has struggled in the past to articulate the joined-up propositions required to address these concerns because of its focus on product stovepipes (as I discussed here).

What I think Microsoft needs, as I explained during various meetings at the summit, are scenarios and associated case studies to bridge between the framework and the products and emphasise the linkage. This will also serve to highlight the importance of the three foundational aspects - federated, interoperable and secure - which might otherwise be lost and to tie into Core, Application Platform and Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization roadmaps which Microsoft is using to help customers understand how they move forward from where they are today.

For Microsoft's customers and potential customers Dynamic IT is a positive sign that company is beginning to recognise that you are more concerned with the outcomes from deploying the company's technologies than you are about the technologies themselves or the way that Microsoft chooses to structure itself to develop and sell them. Over the coming months you should be looking to Microsoft to fill out the framework and seek explanations for how the pieces fit together today and how the company plans to enhance that integration going forward.