Sorry for the delay in blogging recenlty; they changed some submission parameters and had to take some time to figure out why I could not submit anything for a few weeks. All worked out.
While I try not make this blog Sun specific or a mouthpiece for the marketing folks to funnel more brochure ware for consumption, I did want to take today’s entry to review what we have been doing recently in the Sun Software space and why we think its important. Remember, you do not just buy software, you buy the people and the company that stands behind it.
In July, Sun consolidated itself into 4 major groups – Servers, Software, Storage, and Services. This means all of the separate software practices (Identity, SOA, EWS (Middleware), Solaris, etc.) are now under one management group and we are merging the separate software teams into a more unified group. The good news in this for everyone out there is our software will be come more intergated and unified. Our Identity team now works closer with the middleware and SOA teams, which means we can learn from each other and drive more commonality between the offerings. Identity SOA? Why not. Lets see what the merging of minds comes up with.
We also introduced Identity Manager 7.0. The improvements are many, but one of the key improvements is the re-integration of our Identity Auditor into the Identity Manager platform. While these two products (provisioning and auditing) were born with the same genetic code, they were evolving into two separate products. Now, we are merging them back into the same product. If you have a maintenance contract, you should get Auditor with your next software upgrades (please don’t quote me on that; I stay out of licensing issues – no lawyers please).
This makes sense. Because, due to complaince requirements, provisioning and compliance are becoming linked at the hip. So in the future, you can deploy a user account and pre-certify the account allocation against the in place separation of duties policies to pro-actively avoid a conflict. This move auditing to an apriori activity from its usual reaction only position. This follows the software development tenant that the best way to avoid a bug is to never get it into the code in the first place.
Lastly, we announced today an alliance with Accenture. While all of our partnerships are important, including all the major SI’s, this announcement has some additional features. Both Sun and Accenture are investing in building out new IP and capabilities to address major challenges around Identity and SOA. Check the Sun web site for more details.
Good stuff! I didn’t know about the Accenture announcement.