In Brief

Who's Who in Role Management?

Burton Group breaks the market down into two important segments

By Mary Brandel

September 08, 2008 — CSO — The role management software vendor community is relatively young, and as such, Burton Group says there is no clear market leader. Vendors can be categorized into two segments: general purpose solutions and embedded solutions.

General-purpose solutions offer a distinct, stand-alone solution for collecting, organizing, modeling and maintaining roles, as well as disseminating role definitions to users or applications that can leverage them. General-purpose solutions providers include:

• Eurekify. Oldest provider in the market, followed by Bridgestream and Vaau. Well-known for its analytics technology to perform bottom-up discovery and design.
• BHOLD. Privately held firm based in the Netherlands. Original strengths were in access and authorization management but has broadened to include resource provisioning.
• Engiweb. Relatively recent market participant, best known in southern Europe. Its identity management system sees roles as an integral element of the equation, not as an option.
• Omada. Entered the market in 2006, with headquarters in Denmark. Based on Microsoft technologies and closely coupled with SAP.
• Bridgestream (acquired by Oracle). Headquartered in San Francisco, this system's original strengths were in human resources and organizational design, but it has grown to envelop the relationship of roles to privileges. This gives it a strong foundation to balance between business objectives and responsibilities, privileges and resources.
• Vaau (acquired by Sun). Based in Los Angeles, this system is well-known for its compliance capabilities but has strengthened its role engineering and role management capabilities.
• Aveksa. Massachusetts-based firm that specializes in solutions for identity auditing; role and entitlement certification and monitoring; and management of the role and access lifecycle.
• SailPoint. Texas-based provider whose solution is geared toward identity governance, risk management and compliance.

Embedded solutions—role management systems—are provided as part of an identity management application. Many of these vendors form strong partnerships with (or acquire) a general-purpose provider, or they work to augment their own role management capabilities. Vendors include Avatier, Beta Systems Software, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Courion, IBM, MaXware (now a unit of SAP), Novell, Siemens and Völcker Informatik.

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