Novell Identity Manager: Good, bad, and I-dunno

Over the next week or so, I’m going to look at different players in the identity and access market. It’s a great sign of maturity in the IAM market that there are so many very large players in it. I this case, maturity means there’s money in it. Sure, the identity practice at Oracle is a rounding error, but it’s still 100-million-plus dollars, and the two largest provisioning deployments in the world run on Oracle Identity Manager, and Sun made quite a killing in that department as well (as have CA, IBM, and a few others).

Architecturally, IdM products have a lot of similarities. The difference is in the detail and, to some degree, yeah, in the architecture. Workflow is a good place to start looking. Connectivity to back end systems is another. And between the little guys and the big guys, scalability is a huge one. Smaller vendors mean cheaper development means “it runs on Windows only.” Would you trust your multinational enterprise to, I dunno, M-Tech?

Let me dig just a little on a big guy.

Novell is releasing their Identity Manager 4, claiming greater scalability and integration with Sharepoint and SAP. They also say they’re hooking up with various cloud applications. It might not be a bad strategy, embracing Sharepoint, just as Microsoft is repackaging MIIS with Sharepoint and bunch of other pieces and calling it Forefront (more on that one later in the week).

I really wondered what was to become of Novell, after hedge fund Elliott Associates went after them. I remember a partner in the portal market getting sucked up by a hedge fund some years ago, and it was not pretty, since the assumption was at the time (as it was with Novell this past spring) that a fund company would simply plump up a tech acquisition for later resale, and perhaps sell it off in pieces. This talk led Elliott to specifically state that they would NOT carve up Novell.

Instead of shrinking, Novell forged ahead, and it’s helped their press. Their IdM deployments have been fertile ground for conversions. And there’s been good and bad in the Novell offerings over the years. Way back when, their directory didn’t have a lot of muscle, but they horned in on Netscape’s lead by offering their stuff CHEAP. “Yeah, it doesn’t do a lot in comparison, but it’s a fraction of the price.” It seemed their provisioning approach was far too meta-directory based, which means limited workflow and decision-making capabilities.

Even before that, I remember how much I hated UnixWare and its arcane administrative interface. At a trade show years ago, I had a big hit with a tee shirt that read across the back “It runs with UnixWare,” when I added the words “like crap” after the word “runs.”

Even earlier than that, I certified on Netware, and Novell had the greatest game in the world that came with it, “Snipes.” It was DOS-based, and had a little guy in the middle of a maze, running around trying to shoot the snipes while avoiding hitting the wall. You could play as part of a team, or by yourself. For years, I kept a Windows 3.1 box around for no reason other than to play that game.

I’ve never lost to Novell on functionality, although I have on price. I’ve replaced iChain a number of times. They’re advertising drag and drop role management. Since I don’t know of any dev in that arena, and certainly no acquisitions, I was speculating this is really an OEM, perhaps of Securent, that fine-grained entitlements thing that Cisco overpaid for a couple of years ago, because of their drag and drop abilities. But since Cisco subsequently bought Securent’s competitor Rohati, I assume they’re dropping Securent altogether, meaning Novell is plugging in Aveksa, which is bouncing through its own management changes right now.

The year 2009 saw Novell’s open source offerings doing well, while their IAM practice did just the opposite. And while they fended off the hedge fund offer a few months ago, I’m hearing that the issue is kicking up again. Remember, when you’re buying an IAM solution, you’re not just getting software and/or hardware, you’re getting the whole company. Make sure they’ll be around in one piece to support you.