IAM Secures A Place In This World

According to Robert Booker, vice president of security at Syntegra, IAM is one of the company's most active markets in terms of sales and customer interest. It's also a crowded arena, jam-packed with more than 30 vendors, so Syntegra, the $1 billion, Arden Hills, Minn.-based integration arm of British Telecom, spends a lot of time helping customers sift through potential solutions.

"IAM is a confusing market to understand because there are so many products and players," Booker said. "Different vendors spin the market differently based on the way their products fit."

Analysts define identity management as the administration and management of user permissions, privileges and individual profile data. Access management,the flip side of the IAM coin,pertains to the actual enforcement of secure access and refers to authentication and authorization technologies.

In the past year or so, IAM solutions have gone from pricey pipe dreams to business imperatives with potential for significant ROI.

"IAM went from being all about technology to being a real business situation," said Jamie Lewis, CEO of Burton Group, a market-research firm. "Businesses are finding they can save money while dealing with tough regulatory issues and system security."

Government regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbane-Oxley, the proliferation of Web-based applications and the increasingly distributed nature of corporate networks have contributed to making IAM a necessity for virtually every business, especially those with large, sprawling,

heterogeneous IT environments,namely, the Fortune 2000, said Roberta Witty, a research director at Gartner.

"There's a heightened awareness out there," Witty said. "Companies understand now that they have to manage user access to their networks and information."

For solution providers, the IAM space is ripe with opportunity as vendors from Novell and IBM to RSA Security and Oblix work with partners to push their products to market.

Novell, which provides an entire IAM solution stack through its Nsure platform, works with about 60 partners to market and sell its offerings to the enterprise space.

Most of the IAM solutions deployed by Novacoast, a solution provider in Santa Barbara, Calif., bear the Novell brand name. "We work with a lot of government agencies in this market," said Adam Grant, CTO of Novacoast. "And at this point, IAM is up to 15 percent of what we do."

TruLogica, a vendor that's aiming to change the face of IAM by way of its Contextual Identity Management paradigm, is now in the process of building a channel for its Concero platform.

According to Archie Reed, TruLogica's vice president of strategy, the company aims to enlist about 10 partners in the next 12 months.

RSA Security, which currently offers provisioning, access-management and authentication products, works with hundreds of partners worldwide,from Accenture to regional systems integrators,in the IAM space.

Through its latest initiative, code-named Nexus, RSA cuts to the heart of one of the biggest concerns around IAM today: How can businesses achieve truly integrated, coherent IAM solutions given the breadth of players and products in the market?

Some analysts foresee the extinction of best-of-breed, or point, solutions and the predominance of end-to-end IAM product suites. "By 2005, the complexity of IAM solutions will cause 60 percent of customers to choose suites over best-of-breed solutions," said Gartner's Witty.

But others disagree, saying the transition to suites would be very difficult, given the patchwork of IAM products that have already been deployed. "It would be hard to integrate all these products and technologies into seamless suites," said Syntegra's Booker. "And that's the systems integrator's job, after all,putting together different products to create an integrated approach for the customer. That's the business we're in."