Thursday, January 28, 2010

Sun IDM is dead

Sometimes I think I’ve been in this business too long or that perhaps where I got my marketing & PR training (Microsoft) leads me to view things differently – maybe even incorrectly. I read Nishant Kaushik’s post today on the Sun acquisition by Oracle which you can read here. Here’s my translation of what I read in Nishant’s post (below) with my translation in italics. I’m not trying to offend Nishant by any means. I just read these things “differently”.

Oracle Identity Management Suite continues as the strategic family of products, but Oracle will continue to invest in and share technology between Sun and Oracle products = We (Oracle) won. We (Oracle) are the strategic choice. In order not to cause panic we’re going to say that we’re going to continue to invest in the Sun product line. If you were an employee your new title would be “Director, Special Projects”.

Both Oracle Internet Directory (OID) and Sun Directory Server will be supported, with common LDAP administration through our DS Management tools. Oracle will continue to maintain OpenDS. = The maintenance stream on the Sun Directory Server is too huge to disrupt. We’ll integrate the management but we aren’t going to sell the Sun Directory Server anymore. We will continue to bill current customers.

Sun Role Manager will become Oracle Identity Analytics, the strategic identity analytics tool = This is really a good product. We’re going to keep it. It doesn’t overlap any of our other goo. Plus, we really had to give at least one consolation prize to the community (e.g., customers, analysts) and this is it.

Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Entitlements Server and Oracle Identity Federation continue as Oracle’s strategic products for their respective areas, with technology incorporated from Sun = All the Sun products that overlap are dead.

Oracle will invest in Sun Identity Manager and integrate it with Oracle Identity Manager = Sun Identity Manager is dead. If there’s any good stuff in it we’ll stick it in OIM.

Oracle will also invest in Sun OpenSSO and integrate it with OAM = This is a good product but Oracle is here to make money – this won’t continue to be free.

In a year or two we’ll all have to re-group and see what really happened. Time will tell.

5 comments:

Brandts said...

Agreed. Bob Brandt

Anonymous said...

So unfortunate to see the wonderful Suite of SUN Identity products dying.

Identity Crisis | crise d'identité said...

Nice post.

To add to your interesting comments, "Sun Role Manager will become Oracle Identity Analytics, the strategic identity analytics tool = This is really a good product." SRM is database centric, an entitlements warehouse if you like (just like OIM for that matter), no wonder Oracle love it. Adding to that the ORM product (formally Bridgestream), never really took off how Oracle would've liked.

Sun Role Manager was always a confusing name for the acquired Vaau product that had most of its customer base using it for IdC (Identity Certification). Customer to Sun, "We don't have an immediate need for enterprise Roles but we *do* have a Attestation/Certification need right now, why do we need this Role Manager product?). Oracle renaming it to be "Oracle Identity Analytics" can only help bring back some focus to what the product can actually be used for. Well done Oracle.

Disagreed when it comes to Sun Directory Server comment, there's a huge market out there who wants to maintain a file based Directory Server (eerr.. isn't everything a file?), sorry, a non-RDBMS based LDAP Directory Service. I'd expect Sun Directory Server to appear on the Sun/Oracle pricelist, let's wait and see !

OpenDS was never really commercialized by Sun even though officially I think they could but never did really sell any license. I'd expect the smart folks over at Oracle to integrate this new tech ( I mean, Sun DSEE is based on Netscape code more than 10 years old) somehow, they'd be foolish to throw away the OpenDS tech and the people.
Note, OpenDS != Sun DSEE. Sun DSEE is the legacy (Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE/Sun JES) Directory that's based on the C language not Java.

Unknown said...

Its true for the product and also for the forums. So many clients are still using SUN IDm and forums are dying for it. few are still available xpressutils and http://answer.anisoftcorporation.com/ which is using paid experts to answer questions. But the SIM to OIM migration is still a nightmare and pain. Also i don't think OIm 11g is stable enough yet

ProVal Technologies said...

OpenDS was never really commercialized by Sun even though officially I think they could but never did really sell any license
By IT Infrastructure