Posted by Bob Craig - Dir Prod Marketing on Fri, Jan 08, 2010
The industry analyst landscape has been going through some major changes lately. In the latest development, Gartner has acquired Burton Group shortly after snapping up AMR Research in December.
As a leader in the identity and access management (IAM) market, Courion has had positive, fruitful relationships with the IAM analysts at both firms. We have a great deal of respect for the breadth of knowledge and customer service focus demonstrated by both groups of analysts and are proud of Courion's market leadership positioning in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Provisioning and Burton's Market InSight user provisioning report.
Burton provided a valuable, independent perspective which we, many of our customers (and, yes, even our competitors), relied on for an alternative point of view. They have long had a reputation for a high level of technical expertise, while Gartner has generally placed more emphasis on the strategic business impact of IAM. While we will miss the opportunity to compare and contrast Burton's free-wheeling, technological approach with Gartner's corporate viewpoint, the combination of these points of view has the potential to significantly strengthen Gartner's IAM and other security capabilities.
We think both outlooks have a place in the market and hope that Gartner employs a "big tent" strategy that accommodates diverse points of view. Knowing the Gartner team as we do, we are optimistic they will work hard to make the Burton analysts feel welcome. It would be unfortunate if some of the exceptional, creative Burton analysts felt that their perspective wasn't appreciated at Gartner.
However this event turns out, we wish our colleagues in both organizations well and look forward to continuing to work them in the future.
Posted by Bob Craig - Dir Prod Marketing on Wed, Apr 22, 2009
Following the recent announcement of Oracle's Sun acquisition, Ashraf Motiwala has a good post in his
blog describing how Sun convinced a client that a "boutique vendor" was risky as it was more likely to fail or be acquired. Now that client is worried about what's going to happen to their investment, "because of the heavy overlap between the Sun and Oracle product lines".
Posted by Kurt Johnson - VP Strategy on Tue, Apr 21, 2009
Yesterday Oracle announced it had agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems. My friend Dave Kearns sent an email asking for reaction (for those of you unfamiliar with Dave's work, I strongly suggest you subscribe to
his blog and
identity management newsletter) and it got me thinking. Oracle's positioning is talking about providing an integrated system from "application to disk" and also lauds the merits of having Solaris and Java at its disposal. But, nowhere do you hear anything about identity management. This is of no surprise as the acquisition was not motivated by a strategy of combining identity management solutions. However, if you're a Sun identity management customer, you have to be concerned due to the significant overlap between Oracle's and Sun's IAM product lines.
So, this got me thinking about the importance of the "new" vendor viability. As an independent player who is a wee bit smaller than some of the companies we compete with in the IAM market, Courion sees vendor viability thrown in our faces at times in competitive situations. Although we've demonstrated product innovation and leadership (according to Gartner and Burton Group among others) and are recognized for a strong track record of customer success at a fraction of the overall implementation and service costs, our competition (including Sun) would throw the viability FUD in there to try to wrestle deals away. Comments such as "They're too small"; "They're not going to be around much longer"; "We're going to crush them" have all been things we've heard in selling cycles for a long time.
Well, I believe the Oracle Sun acquisition highlights where the real viability concerns lie. Clearly the IAM business was not a consideration of Oracle when acquiring Sun. There is tremendous overlap between the product sets and one can only suspect that Oracle will be announcing an end of life plan for the Sun Identity Manager products before too long.
Consider other announcements over the last few years. HP acquires Trulogica as an entry into the identity management market only to announce a few years later that HP was getting out of the business. Similarly BMC announced it was dropping traditional identity management. After acquiring Netegrity, much of the original Business Layers identity management products have been "evolved" by CA under a completely different architecture. It sure appears to me that size has nothing to do with IAM vendor viability.
IAM is what Courion does. We can't afford to give away hardware, operating systems, databases, or anything else if the project goes bad. We must have customer success for each and every project as there is no other way for Courion to "make it up" to the customer. Clearly a company like Courion is not planning on getting out of the IAM business.
IAM is a strong and growing market, and is still a top priority in even the current economic climate. But, when vendors use their IAM business as a way to help pull other products and push infrastructure on customers, success is measured in more than pure IAM revenue. True vendor viability concerns should be focused on these larger organizations and prospective customers need to look carefully at the nature of their commitment and the viability of their overall business. The commitment these organizations have to IAM should be a major concern. Courion's focus for IAM is to solve real, critical business problems. Its purpose is not to sell other pieces of infrastructure. This is what we do and we like to think we're doing it pretty well. We're growing. We're profitable. We've got a customer base full of happy customers. That all sounds pretty viable to me.
What are your thoughts?