Killer app for Sun in identity management?
When Sun announced its acquisition of Waveset Technologies in November 2003, I was more than a little sceptical, given the company’s chequered history when it comes to software acquisitions (remember what happened to NetDynamics, Kiva, Forte, etc?).
Last week I had the opportunity to get an update on Sun’s identity management business from Sara Gates, VP of Identity Management Marketing, and Don Bowen, Director of Directory Services. It seems my initial scepticism was misguided.
With Waveset, Sun clearly sought to plug a gap in its identity management portfolio with the acquisition of well-respected user management and provisioning technology. But whereas Sun has historically adopted a technology-first approach to such acquisitions, leading to significant re-engineering and loss of key personnel from the acquired company, this time it tried something different. Instead, the company adopted a market-first approach, which culminated in a dedicated identity management business unit with full P&L responsibility, with Waveset personnel in the driving seat across sales, R&D, marketing etc.
It seems to me that this is due in no small part to the management and political skills of the Waveset team. The fact that Sun’s software marketing across the board is now run by the former president and founder of Waveset, and that identity management is the number two growth and investment area for Sun’s software business (behind only Solaris), provide testament to this.
Within three months of the finalisation of the acquisition, the combined portfolio of 8 products had been rationalised to 3. The products were launched three months later, in June 2004, and by the end of the year the business unit had doubled revenues across the identity management portfolio. The existence of the a dedicated identity management salesforce and the cultivation of a number of effective partnerships with systems integrators such as Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Accenture – contrasting once again with the history of Sun’s software business – has undoubtedly contributed to this success, complementing the market-led approach following the acquisition.
Identity management is potentially a great focus for Sun, because the technology is the foundation for business infrastructure that is truly driven by the increasing level of internetworking. If “the network is the computer”, then identity management is what makes the computer a mature, trustable proposition. The Waveset folks really get this: they see that the emergence of highly distributed and heterogeneous service-based IT architectures requires an approach to authorisation, authentication and access control that breaks down historical application-centric stovepiped solutions. Identity management must be delivered as a set of similarly distributed, interoperable services.
I don’t think it’s all going to be plain sailing for Sun though. Despite the success of the acquisition to date and a clear vision for the future, the identity management business unit will have to work hard to exploit these emerging opportunities. In the period since the Waveset acquisition many of the pure-play identity management players have been acquired: TruLogica and SelectAccess by HP; Netegrity by CA, Calendra and OpenNetwork by BMC; and, most recently Oblix by Oracle. Enterprises are looking to consolidate the number of vendors they deal with and as a result may well prefer to acquire identity management as part of a broader systems management/software infrastructure/enterprise application solution. Sun lacks credible solutions in these areas and so its identity management business unit is operating largely as a pure-play.
