Blogger: Mark Diodati
Since Burton Group migrated to salesforce.com several years ago, we have better insight into our customer interactions. This improvement is particularly true for our dialogues. Dialogues are interactive sessions with customers based upon their specific questions.
There a great tool associated with salesforce.com – the sforce Connector. With this tool, I can query salesforce.com directly from Microsoft Excel, then slice and dice the dialogue data at will (something that makes me happy as a CPA). I queried salesforce.com for IdPS dialogues between May 2008 and May 2009. Here is the summary of the IdPS dialogues by topic:
Authentication - 22.5%
Access Management - 14.4%
Provisioning - 12.7%
Identity Management Market - 8.4%
Directory Services - 6.9%
Role Management - 5.6%
Emerging Technologies - 5.4%
Federation - 5.4%
Authorization and Entitlement Management - 4.4%
Audit and Compliance - 4.2%
Privacy - 3.1%
Other - 2.3%
Relationships - 2.1%
Service Oriented Identity - 1.7%
On Demand Identity - 0.4%
Reference Architecture - 0.4%
I’ve provided additional facts worth considering.
- Dialogues for SSO are distributed across the “Authentication”, “Access Management”, and “Federation” topics.
- The dialogues associated with the “Other” topic are mostly ITIL, organizational responsibilities, and cost justification.
- The majority of “Directory Services” topics are associated with dialogues regarding virtual directories and Active Directory (including products which complement it).
- The “Identity Management Market” topic includes a material number of dialogues on the future of Sun IdM products after the Oracle acquisition.
- Believe it or not, the “Authentication” topic has a material number of dialogues associated with PKI.
The top dialogues from last year are about the same as this year. For a virtually identical period (May 2007 to May 2008), the top four dialogue topics were “Authentication”, “Provisioning”, “Federation”, and “Access Management” – in that order. My conclusion from reviewing the top dialogue topics over the past two years is that some of our customers are grappling with leading-edge identity topics like service oriented identity and on demand identity. However, many more of our customers are focused on more “traditional” IdM concerns (i.e., authentication, provisioning, and access management).
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