SSOCircle

Burton Group, acquired by Gartner, Inc., recently published their IdM Market Profile report: “Identity Management 2010”. A very interesting report that not only described the current market but outlines the changes and the future trends IdM is or will be going through.

As there is still unclaritiy on what we generally understand by “IdM Market”, Burton group’s report starts with the definition of what the “IdM” Market is composed of:

• Active Directory Bridge
• Directory services
• Enterprise single sign-on (ESSO)
• Federation
• Fine-grained authorization
• Identity and access governance
• Identity assurance
• Privileged account management (PAM)
• Provisioning
• Stronger authentications
• Web access management

IdM is now a wide portofolio and not, like some people still may think, only account provision software. When it comes to delivery options for software, Burton Group stated that new options are becoming more commodity. Citing from the report “Vendors have begun to become more creative in their delivery of product to customers. Vendors have begun to offer:

• Subscription licenses
• Appliance (both physical and virtual) delivery options
• Software as a service or hosted delivery options”

and important to mention from our perspective:

“A few vendors have begun to focus on the problems of using identity services from the cloud as well as identity services to and in the cloud.”

Burton’s conclusion:
“The growing identity management market is vibrant. Constantly consolidating yet never consolidated, the IdM market is mature, but that maturity is unevenly spread across the market’s sub-markets. New entrants and approaches have continued to appear, and a number of them are focused on the emerging problems that the cloud poses from an identity perspective. …”

One part in “Burton Group’s Opinion” is exactly what we experience in real life projects:
“Although enterprises have expressed to Burton Group that their needs have outgrown the most mature parts of the IdM market, Burton Group has observed fantastic growth in those same market segments. This indicates that even though architects and identity teams can be fascinated with newer, shinier technologies, their enterprises still have basic identity needs such as user provisioning and WAM.”

When describing the market landscape Burton Group’s describes what SSOCircle propagates as a very important aspect for a while: Idm Is increasingly seen and preparing itself to work in concert with other markets, namely of:

• Business process management (BPM)
• Data leakage prevention (DLP)
• Risk management
• Security information and event management (SIEM)
• Service management

Read the detailed report at “http://www.burtongroup.com/Research/PublicDocument.aspx?cid=1990”