Blogger: Kevin Kampman
Today CA announced the acquisition of Eurekify. Eurekify is the last of the original “big three” general purpose role management firms (Bridgestream, Vaau, Eurekify) to be acquired by a major identity management vendor. Oracle acquired Bridgestream and Sun acquired Vaau over the last 12 months. CA’s acquisition underscores the importance of roles in IdM, security, and related concerns, such as governance. At this point, integrated role management has become a competitive necessity for IdM offerings.
Eurekify provided one of the earliest discovery mechanisms for roles by examining the relationship of entitlements to users. Being first is not always beneficial, however. Early role management projects frequently became ensnared in, and failed, due to the difficulties of reconciling user entitlements to roles. Eurekify bore the brunt of the fallout of these challenges, even as it tried to address data quality issues, which continue to be the biggest challenge to these bottom-up discovery efforts. Fortunately, Eurekify’s persistence, willingness to engage the business, and subsequent focus on a sustainable management model brought clarity to the challenge.
The value of Eurekify’s initial vision was apparent. A number of IdM firms have, or have had, partnerships with the company. In the true nature of partnerships, many of these have expired or gone away; Eurekify’s most recent partnership with CA has become permanent. This leaves IBM and Novell among those still dating; Eurekify has moved on.
Eurekify’s influence has spawned competition and new development. Today we have a number of established and emerging role management solutions (such as SailPoint and Aveksa), who have participated in and benefited from the change in role management’s focus from administrative efficiency to business alignment. In reality, Eurekify may not be the last of the acquisition announcements, but it certainly underscores the importance of role management to identity initiatives.
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