Back in September, Oracle announced that it had acquired privately-held Enterprise Role Management (ERM) player Bridgestream continuing its "identity management-through-acquisition" strategy. With many eyes focused on the company's Oracle Open World shindig this week, Sun also entered the fray with its plans to acquire another leader ERM independent: Vaau. Role-based access control (RBAC) is hardly new: the US' National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated standardisation efforts back in 2000 and an ANSI/INCITS standard (359-2004 if you're that way inclined) was published in 2004. So why all this acquisition activity?

As with many things identity management, it's primarily driven by compliance, with a small helping of increased operational efficiency and cost reduction. As well as promising to streamline the provisioning and de-provisioning of entitlements, roles can help organisations to define, enforce and demonstrate those entitlements to address regulatory compliance demands.

The realisation of that potential, however, has proved elusive. Organisations have struggled to identify (!) the roles that they need, and inconsistent management approaches have often resulted in an explosion of roles to the point where there are as many roles as users. The likes of Bridgestream, Eurekify and Vaau, whose offerings provide role discovery, analysis, allocation and provisioning, emerged specifically to address these challenges, creating the identity management sub-market of ERM along the way.

With compliance top-of-mind for many of their customers and prospects, the major identity management suite vendors who were unable to respond as rapidly as the nimble ERM start-ups, quickly established partnerships and, in some cases, moved beyond the press release to actually provide pre-built integration. Sun, for example, provides bi-directional data integration with Vaau (which should help to speed up the integration process). With two of the leading ERM players now with competitors, this leaves the likes of CA and IBM in an interesting position. Their partnership teams no doubt have their eyes (and potentially their wallets) pointing in the direction of Israel, where Eurekify is based.

Some of you may wonder why I didn't include Novell in this list. Had I been writing this post straight after the Sun announcement it would have been. But not long after the announcement I came across this post from an identity management group blog at Novell, which discusses how the company has been building its own role management capabilities, focused on role provisioning, exploiting its directory heritage (discussed in more detail in our assessment here) and partnership with Eurekify for role discovery and analysis. The post's author claims no knowledge of acquisition talks. Then lo and behold, and far be it from me to suggest that Sun's announcement had anything to do with the timing, the next day Novell announced its new Roles Based Provisioning Module.

Of course, a Eurekify acquisition by Novell could still be on the cards, despite the blogger's ignorance of any such discussions, but it seems to me based on Novell's stated strategy that the Israeli company is more likely to end up in the arms of CA or IBM.

The implications for customers are varied. Bridgestream and Vaau customers, who have plumped for a vendor other than Oracle or Sun, should be a little nervous and seeking concrete assurances regarding ongoing support. Customers of the likes of CA, IBM and Novell who are considering ERM will have to think very carefully before plumping for Bridgestream or Vaau for similar reasons.