Yes, you can … but DON’T !!!

It sucks getting old. I have aged fillings that occasionally turn into broken teeth. Last year I got contacted by a college girlfriend on Facebook, and it was a frightening thing. I hadn’t spoken to her since 1986 for a reason. I’m getting a bad disk in my lower back.

But one of the advantages of getting old is keeping stuff that had become useless and then is suddenly useful again. I’ve seen my thin ties come in and out of style twice. On Ugly Day at school, the kids will always find something in my wardrobe that’s appropriate. The other day I actually found a purpose for some thirty year old shoelaces that have been in my drawer since my first apartment.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Some stuff you should consider canning. If not immediately, then within a reasonable timeframe. Nostalgia is one thing; clutter is another.

So I keep getting asked about end-of-lifed products in the IdM space. There’s been consolidation, mergers, re-alignment, that all point in a different direction for some old software. Typically there’s a very good reason a piece of code goes away. And sometimes the answer is the same one I give my kids when they want to know WHY they have to be home before midnight: BECAUSE. There’s the answer. A decision had to be made, and this is the decision.

Take a look at the Oracle-Sun coupling. They truly created a best of breed selection when they merged the IdM product lines. The more stable and viable products survived, and the others got put into maintenance mode. The customers of these mothballed products aren’t suddenly on their own; they get support. But they’re being strongly encouraged to contemplate the future.

The directory services area is a great example where Oracle has assembled a menu of options that include the best of what Oracle and Sun both had at the time of the acquisition. It’s coming to one dashboard, one management model, multiple directory models. Virtual, meta.

Access management is still anchored by Oracle Access Manager and Adaptive Access Manager, but with Sun’s Fedlet and Secure Token Service thrown in.

Open SSO? It’s still available, but know exactly what you’re going to do with it.

The elephant in the room has been Sun Identity Manager. Way back when, it was Waveset, and in fact it has been renamed Oracle Waveset, to prevent confusion over dueling identity managers. Its users have not been abandoned, but SIM has been deemed a “non-strategic” product. This means it doesn’t have a future. It is truly the vampire child of IdM: it won’t get any better, but it won’t get any older. It will simply exist as is, until support goes away altogether.

That’s not for a while. But if you’re a SIM customer, you need to seriously consider your future. Start planning a path for migrating that proprietary scripting language in your workflows into BPEL. There are tools that help point down that path, but there’s definitely still work to be done. If you’ve customized it or, worse yet, had some integration partner do it FOR you, you absolutely need to begin the process of envisioning your future without SIM.

Eventually, even those thin ties will hit the wall.