AD Bridging gets respect at Burton's Catalyst09

day two at catalyst09 was very on target for me. the identity track was all about leveraging existing resources for bigger ROI and that’s all we ever talk about in PM meetings around here. Burton’s Mark Diodati presented about the AD Bridge space, a name he may have invented, and then there was also a customer case about the practice of doing AD Bridging for Unix, Mac and Linux systems. the best part was when a person in the audience took the mic during Q&A and thanked Mark and Burton for taking the AD Bridge products seriously and the whole audience erupted in applause.

i’ve got lots of notes and thoughts about everything that went on. i’ll likely be posting reactions to catalyst09 over the next week.

what's on the mind of people seeking IAM solutions

Mark Diodati from Burton Group put together an article about what he sees his clients asking about. what surprised me were some of the categories he used. something like “Access Management” is so broad that it acts as a catch all. not surprisingly it gets second place after “Authentication” with 14.4% to authN’s 22.5%. Of course, authN is also pretty broad, but “Access Management” can cover just about every topic relevant to IAM given the chance. to be fair, i’m not sure what you can do about an issue like this. when you’re asking people to classify their comments, there’s only so specific you can get before you confuse or bore.

complaints about methodology aside, there was not much that’s surprising here. a lot of it mirrors our own 7 projects, those tactical goals that are the eggs and juice of the IAM healthy breakfast. If there was any surprise, it was “Federation” at 5.4% and “Authorization and Entitlement Management” at 4.4%. It seems like that’s all IAM folks and many clients want to talk about. But maybe a lot of that buzz got sucked into “Access Management” where it could rightfully belong.

authZ everywhere

i’ve been spending a lot of time with prospects and clients. every one of these meetings is set up to talk about identity lifecycle and authN. but every single one ends up in a discussion about authZ. friday afternoon i sat in one of the nicer buildings in uptown manhattan and we were talking to a big media company. we were talking about their homegrown websso solution and how quest may be able to offer them something more robust. i mentioned that our product could also do some basic authZ work and the lead on the project said “if you want to talk about authorization we’ll need two more hours”. i scratched at the surface a little bit, but we only had 20 more minutes for that meeting. “everyone is challenged with this right now if they have even a slightly complex shop” the customer was very clear to state.

certainly, authZ is a big topic. Gartner’s last IAM conference made it clear that getting an authZ strategy in line is the next big task for a well run IT shop. MSFT is ready to take a fresh run at the issue in Geneva with a better chance of success (MSDN Blogs). there are some really cool players in the space like Bitkoo. and there are some really big companies taking the plunge through acquiring, the biggest being the Cisco + Securent take down. but there seems to be a big break in the types of companies i see actively looking into this. it’s the smallest of the big and the biggest of the small. shops that, not coincidentally, have the right kind of budget and the right level of complexity to be far enough along in a maturity cycle that this can edge it’s way out to the front as a real project. but project or not, everyone wants to talk about it. it will be interesting to watch it all play out.