Courion Corporation

Oracle Buying Sun: Defining IAM Vendor Viability

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?