Stockholm syndrome and Gartner provisioning quadrant

I will be speaking at the Identity and access management seminar in Stockholm Sweden on May 3 this spring.

My talk will primarily cover how to upgrade IAM systems including how to integrate "newer" functionality from the IAG space. I think the seminar will be very interesting so if you happen to be in the area I would recommend attending. Even if you are not in the area you know that you want to visit the land of the socialist nightmare (or statuesque blonds, pick your choice).

When you upgrade your IAM system you have to make two major choices:

1. What software package will I use?
2. Who will perform the upgrade?

The answer to the first question can be determined in many different ways (i.e. who plays golf with whom) but lets take a look at the new Gartner user provisioning magic quadrant and see if that provides any answers.

This years magic quadrant is rather boring which probably reflects the maturity of the market. The big three (IBM, CA and Oracle) is hanging out in the upper right corner with Oracle having a slight edge. Courion pulls off another strong showing and the cat with at least 99 lives (Novell) seems to be alive and well.

IBM, CA and Oracle are also the only players with a more or less fully featured and more or less integrated IAM stack. The down side is that the packages from the big three tend to have high license costs and also are quite complex to install and configure.

Due to the acquisition of the provisioning module from BMC Sailpoint now has a decent provisioning offer. Not as fully featured as the leaders but definitely a competitive offering.

The challengers section of the report contains a number of interesting vendors such as Forgerock and Lighthouse.

Overall there were very few surprises in the report and you can almost read between the lines that the Gartner analysts are much more excited about the new IAG quadrant (courtesy of Sailpoint).