CA sprints towards 2009

Oracle acquired Bridgestream (I wrote about this here). Then Sun acquired VAAU. Now CA's acquired the last remaining high profile role management player, Eurekify.

First of all, congratulations to founder Ron Rymon (he's the only person from Eurekify I've actually met) and the team. As I said to Ron earlier this week, it makes a lot of sense and I think it's a good fit.

I've written about CA's moves in the past and also mentioned the CA-Eurekify partnership in passing. It looks like they're keeping the momentum up and making a lot of headway towards competing with the other leaders in the Identity and Access Management marketplace.

I don't think the Eurekify acquisition is going to change the landscape too much mainly because of the existing partnership. The initial benefit is going to be that their sales reps probably get paid more commission for selling "CA Role Manager" or whatever they call the Eurekify product. In the longer term however, they're obviously going to have to integrate Eurekify's products into the CA stack so there's eventually going to be the "out of the box" integration benefits. Of course, the main benefit to CA as a company is in being able to market the fact they are now a serious role management player (along with Oracle and Sun).

The Eurekify acquisition also plays very nicely into CA's move towards being a strong GRC player. Eurekify's product set does include some GRC components geared towards identity compliance with an obvious focus on roles. CA's existing GRC Manager lacks some of the features around the identity-centric compliance niche that SailPoint and Aveksa play in but I'd be very surprised if CA doesn't fill the gaps using Eurikify's technology given that Sun just released their Identity Compliance Manager (which I believe was based on VAAU technology - all you Sun bloggers can correct me if I'm wrong about this) product and the fact that Oracle has something along these lines on the roadmap (according to Amit Jasuja when I spoke to him).

CA compounded their GRC march this weekend at CA World by announcing a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of their GRC Manager product, dubbed GRC Manager On Demand. This makes them the first large Identity and Access Management software vendor (the others being IBM, Sun, Oracle and Novell) to release a SaaS offering. I'm unsure how well it's going to sell given the results of my Managed Identity Services survey but what it does show is intent on CA's part to get serious about competing and getting ahead.

Oracle, Sun and CA have been very active of late. IBM and Novell have not. In fact, they have been VERY quiet. IBM will actually be releasing a new Entitlement Management product later this year but that's a little ho hum as I've already said. I have a feeling something is brewing because IBM and Novell cannot afford to sit around and watch everyone else get waaaay ahead. Novell's Access Governance Suite is an OEM of Aveksa's software. In other words, if Novell acquires someone in the role management/identity compliance area, my money's on Aveksa. This leaves IBM and SailPoint as the remaining pair. Watch this space.