Sun has plans for the Identity and Access Management (IAM) segment of the market, reports Brian Prince, reporting for eWEEK.com. Working with Passlogix and ActivIdentity on enterprise single sign-on, Sun is striving to establish deeper technical integration across Sun’s products. Enterprises can expect enhancements to Sun’s identity management offerings around SSO later this year, Prince reports.

Sun is also working on the simplification of identity implementations through the use of composite reusable services, Prince has learned. The company is rearchitecting its products to construct them of composite, reusable services, he writes, which would enable Sun to leverage components across their entire product portfolio, having manufactured these components as basic, standardized elements.

“We are focused on making Sun's entire IAM product line simpler to use, open and more scalable,” said Mark Herring, vice president of Software Infrastructure marketing at Sun. “Customers [are] looking to extend their IAM solutions to provide access management, auditing, provisioning, reporting and attestation across all the constituents and across all the applications and systems in their organizations,” he told Prince.

Another element in Sun's IAM strategy has to do with reducing complexity, toward which end Sun has worked on enhancing the user interface for several of its products. The company plans to continue this effort in the next version of Identity Manager, for example, which will have a complete interface overhaul to reduce the need for workflow customization, Prince observes.

“We believe our unique value add to this market is our proven leadership with a large set of very happy customers,” Herring said. “Our team is dedicated to helping our customers attack the complexity of identity issues with simplicity.”

The result of these efforts may address the concerns of some analysts who note that Sun's financial condition is impeding its competitive development against IBM and Oracle, for instance. Lori Rowland, an analyst with the Burton Group, has said, “From a competitive stand-point I believe Sun’s biggest challenge will be building their portfolio at the rate Oracle, CA, and IBM are. These vendors have made numerous acquisitions. Sun may not have the resources to build or buy technologies and thus may have a difficult time competing feature to feature in the future. Also Sun is losing momentum to the marketing and sales engines of Oracle and IBM.”

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Complete text of the Brian Prince article

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