Courion Corporation

What’s a Sun Dial in the Shade?

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I was reading the recently published "Market Overview: Enterprise Role Management" by Andras Cser of Forrester and I was struck by his comment about Courion adding a "whopping" number of roles customers in 2008. The report goes on to talk about the need for enterprise roles, double digit market growth rates in a down economy and a bunch of
products that all sound the same- "All products, with the exception of IBM's TIM, support role mining, role management, role versioning, compliance reporting, definition, and enforcement of segregation of duties out-of-the-box".

By the time I finished the report, I had 2 questions stuck in my craw:

1. Why is Courion, who Forrester positions between the big iron guys and trendy pure play role vendors, thriving even in a down economy?
2. If I was about to start a roles project, who would I pick as a vendor?

I suspect that the answer to both comes down to value.

By themselves, roles have no more value that a sundial in the shade. They help you define what people should have access to but they don't actually grant or verify access. You will need a well integrated provisioning and compliance solution to ensure that the right people have the right access to the right resources and are doing the right things.

Also, your solution has to leverage what you have rather than requiring a rebuild of your core IT infrastructure. Otherwise you'll end up a cure that's worse than the illness.

If you're about to embark on a roles initiative, here's some things to consider:

• What problem am I'm trying to solve?
• How will it be funded? Will the expense be approved? Can the solution generate efficiencies fast enough to be self funding?
• Does it actually work? Can you see it in a POC? Does the vendor have references that can speak to the business value that they have achieved?

If you use this approach you should be successful and, I think, Courion will add a whopping number of new customers in 2009 as well.