Microsoft Identity Manager next on the cards?

Possibly. For now, they're calling it "Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007".

At the same keynote I spoke of in my previous post, Microsoft also made mention of this extension to their Enterprise Identity capabilities:

"Available to customers in May, ILM 2007 is a new solution that builds on Microsoft’s metadirectory and user provisioning capabilities by adding support for managing strong credentials such as certificates and smart cards. ILM provides an integrated and comprehensive solution for managing the entire life cycle of a user identity."

There's not a lot of technical detail around, so it's difficult to tell if that means they're finally joining the Enterprise Identity Management party (about 5 years late) or simply announcing certificate and smart card support for their update to MIIS while continuing to pass off MIIS as a real Identity Management product rather than what it REALLY is - a synchronisation tool for pulling data into Active Directory in Microsoft centric environments that occasionally pushes data outwards (they pretend this is real provisioning).

Yes I still work for IBM (at least for another week and a half) so you can say I'm being biased and anti-Microsoft. But you don't see me bagging CA, Sun, Novell, Oracle or BMC do you? That's because they have real products. Not some proprietary directory synchronisation tool they pretend does more than just move user data around. Of course, if Microsoft can prove me wrong, I'll eat my words.