Role Up-Role Up

Old news but Sun has indicated its intent to acquire Vaau, all being well the acquisition will close in early 2008. This is the first time I have been at an organisation that has been involved in the whole acquisition and merger process. I guess with all companies that are being acquired there is a degree of mixed emotions from the staff, on the down side the lose of the small, expert “niche player” status and the perceived lose of feeling part of a close knit team. On the other side, the excitement of new challenges and experiences as well as some of the opportunities that exist within a large multinational organisation.

Sun and Vaau are a great fit, from both a technology and people point of view. From my prospective, looking solely at the Identity and Access market space, I like that Sun are at the top of the Gartner magic quadrant and look ready and willing to invest and innovate to ensure they stay there.

In my opinion everyone wins with this acquisition, Sun have a fantastic reputation in acquiring and strengthening products as they have done with the iPlanet and Waveset technologies, this in turn benefits customers and drives the whole identity management space forward. 

Kevin Kampman, about 12 months ago wrote that ERM vendors were like domino’s, his analogy being that once one vendor went then the others would quickly follow, from an acquisition point of view. He appears to have been pretty close to the money, with Oracle acquiring Bridgestrean and Sun set to acquire Vaau. It would appear that Novell have developed their own role management offering. So out of the large IdM players this still leaves IBM, CA, Microsoft and BMC with a roles/role management gap to plug. On the ERM side Eurekify is possibly the most mature, but there are others such as Aveska, Sailpoint, Bhold and Omada.

Place you bets…..who’s next to be acquired and by who??? Role management is a red hot subject and I am sure there will be further announcements soon.

After a horrendous wait I finally got my CISSP results from (ISC)2 and have fortunately passed the CISSP exam. It is by far the strangest exam I think I have ever taken, 6 hours to complete 250 very fluffy multi choice questions. There is a lot to the exam at a conceptual level, at least. As folks say it is a mile long and an inch thick. Success story for me, but the annoying thing was the delay in receiving my results. The delay was due to systems upgrades at (ISC)2, this upgrade appeared to disrupt all normal operations and created huge delays. These things happen but we are not talking hours or days we are talking weeks. the funny side of this (in a perverse way) is that (ISC)2 are very big on Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR), ensuring things run to plan and enabling an organisation to get back up and running as quickly as possible in order to sustain its self. The theory is great but I am not sure how well (ISC)2 heed their own teachings in practise.

It was a good exercise in patience and in my opinion worth the wait, the plan is now to move on and try for CISM, keeps the old grey matter ticking over if nothing else!!!