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Hitachi may take Larry Ellison approach to identity management - buy, buy, buyMy phone rang at 8:30 a.m. one day last week, which isn't that strange an occurrence. East coast PR people sometimes seem to think that, since Network World publishes my stuff I must live in Massachusetts. But this call was from someone in the Mountain Time zone who happened to be in California that day. It was Idan Shoham, M-Tech Technology's CTO, and he wanted to make sure I was OK since I wasn't on the list for his press conference that morning. The event would be "interesting" was all that he would say about it. And it sure was. The conference was to announce that Hitachi had bought a majority interest in M-Tech which will henceforth be known as Hitachi-ID. An interesting announcement on many levels. When a mega-corporation (and Hitachi is one of the “mega-est”) buys a small vendor, frequently the shining lights of the smaller player will soon look for greener pastures to satisfy their entrepreneurial drive. But by not buying 100% of M-Tech, and agreeing to leave the current management lineup in place with the freedom to continue to innovate, Hitachi gets many of the benefits of an acquisition while avoiding a lot of the headaches. This isn’t something everyone could do - it’s very infrequent in the tech industries. I couldn’t imagine IBM, Microsoft or Oracle doing something like this. It might prove difficult in the long run if Hitachi hopes to assemble a number of ready-made applications and solutions into a cohesive identity management suite, but it's something to keep an eye on. Hitachi has been, really, a non-starter in the identity management space. It has some sort of biometric thingy that Japanese banks use, but otherwise the only time I think of the company is when I’m looking for entertainment electronics. So why is Hitachi doing this? And why M-Tech? That company’s major successes has been with Canadian government offices and agencies. If Hitachi wanted to make a splash, why not go for a higher profile company? My opinion (I know you didn’t ask for it, but you’re going to get it anyway) is that this is just the first move by Hitachi. It recognizes that all of the parts of identity management from password management to regulatory compliance affect most of its customers. It's tired of having to recommend someone else’s stuff to get the job done. It also recognizes that Idan and M-Tech CEO Gideon Shoham are really knowledgeable about this identity stuff. I think that Hitachi is going to go all Larry Ellison here, and start acquiring pieces of identity management in the same way Oracle has done over the past few years. And it's going to let these two crazy Israelis (they moved from the land of milk and honey to the land of ice and snow, didn’t they?) put it together for them. Remind me in a year and we’ll see how right - or wrong - I was. Subscribe to this and other newsletters. Oracle centralizes security processes into Service-Oriented SecurityLast week I told you about RSA's (that's RSA, The Security Division of EMC, of course) announcements at the RSA 2008 Conference. Today we’ll cover a few more and try to get to the rest in the next issue. Next week we’ll begin coverage of the 2nd European Identity Conference which begins on April 22. But let's start off by looking at what Oracle did, and didn’t, announce at RSA. The biggest announcement signaled a change in philosophy for Larry Ellison’s company. In essence, Oracle will decouple the hard-coded security features from enterprise applications. Well, there is more to it than that! Instead, it will re-institute those features in a fashion Oracle's calling Service-Oriented Security (SOS), which should enable organizations to simplify and centralize critical security processes including authentication, authorization, user administration, role management, identity virtualization and governance, and entitlement management, as well as audit and control using reusable, standards-based security services and protocols which any application can consume. SOS is sorted into four IT processes – development, deployment, administration and governance. Development is represented by the company's ongoing effort to grow the Identity Governance Framework (IGF) as an open standard. Governance is covered by Oracle Application Access Controls Governor (currently Version 8.0). Administration is handled by Oracle Fine Grained Authorization (currently in controlled beta release with a planned public release later this year). The deployment process will be handled by Oracle Role Manager, which got an announcement all its own. With immediate availability, Oracle Role Manager is the first shipment of the product Oracle acquired when it purchased Bridgestream last fall. According to Oracle, the package enables customers to "define and manage organizational relationships, roles, and associated privileges for improved security and regulatory compliance. Business users are empowered to manage business roles accurately and efficiently by utilizing advanced statistical analysis, administrative automation tools and a highly flexible design interface.” There doesn’t appear to be any new functionality in this release except for some tighter integration into the middleware Oracle Fusion stack. Still, someone’s been working long hours to get this out this quickly, just six months after the acquisition closed. The biggest announcement at RSA didn’t come from a traditional identity management vendor but from an appliance maker. Kitchen appliances, that is. And I don’t mean Siemens. Check back next time for more on that. ©2007 by Network World, Inc. 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, Massachusetts 01772. Reprinted from Network World. |
PRESS
RELEASES Tuesday, Jan 6 Gemalto and McAfee, Inc. Introduce Simple Two-Factor Authentication for Full Disk Encryption
You are Never Alone
Bandit, Higgins, Open Source, Profit and Novell
Access Agents
Online Identity - Your Doing it Wrong
Why Information Rights Management is mandatory…
LDAP as the COBOL of Identity?
Managing your identity
Improved Security on the Identity Infrastructure
Liberty Alliance Announces Call for Nominations for the 2008 IDDY Awards
Siemens bundles identity management and biometrics
Exostar Launches Federated Identity-as-a-service Offering
Cyber-Ark ''Clear Choice'' Winner for Privileged Account Management Solutions
Oy vay Oracle!!!
Tools4ever, Inc Releases New Case Study Showing the Versatility of its Software in a New Market
Centrify Expands Engineering Management to Lead Centrify Technology Innovations
Exostar Launches Federated Identity-as-a-Service Offering
IdM Key to Safeguarding Sensitive Data
Novell Delivers Broadest and Most Integrated Portfolio of Identity and Security Management Solutions in Support of SAP Enterprise Software Applications
VeriSign Wins SC Magazine Europe Award for Best Identity Management
ID Conference coverage
Visual Identity
Identity Management Software Market to Reach $4.9 Billion by 2012
Informatica boosts identity management
Exostar Set to Launch Federated Identity Service for Aerospace
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