BEA today announced a stategic partnership with CA, which will see the latter's access and identity management solutions (SiteMinder and Identity Manager) integrated with the former's WebLogic and AquaLogic application and service infrastructure platforms.

I agree completely with Wai Wong's (BEA's executive vice president of products) statement in the press release that

Identity and Access Management is critical within SOA

not least because we have said as much in our service infrastructure assessment model and our report on identity management.

Despite this agreement, I am still left a tad confused by this partnership as it is far from clear what this means for AquaLogic Enterprise Security (ALES), which BEA describes as

a fine-grained entitlement management solution that combines centralized policy management with distributed policy decision-making and enforcement. This combination provides management and control of your critical applications

How will SiteMinder integrate with ALES? Will ALES continue to integrate with other identity and access management solutions? Does BEA plan to provide a common policy definition and enforcement framework across ALES and SiteMinder?

We point out in our assessment of BEA's service infrastructure offerings that there are some important gaps when it comes to security and identity management, which explains why BEA felt the need to establish this partnership. However, as well as answering a number of questions from potential adopters, this partnership is going to raise a few more for existing customers with an investment in ALES. I for one look forward to learning more about the two companies' plans to

validate and further extend integration between CA SiteMinder and BEA WebLogic and AquaLogic technologies