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Whoooooooo are you?

You almost need an ID management product to keep track of who acquired who in this space.
Oracle announced its acquisition of ID management vendor Thor Technologies this morning, for an undisclosed sum.
Now, in case you were wondering what happened to the rest of the space, here's a refresher on the timeline:

  • September 2002 - IBM acquires Access360
  • November 2003 - Sun acquires Waveset
  • January 2004 - Netegrity acquires Business Layers
  • October 2004 - CA acquires Netegrity
  • November 2005 - Oracle acquires Thor Technologies

That leaves Novell with its DirXML product suite and Courion with its IdM suite.

You might say, "Hey! What about Oblix?"

What about them? Oracle acquired them soon after they had acquired Web services management/security vendor, Confluent. So Oracle now has a full portfolio in this space that covers everything from provisioning to Web services security.

This gives Oracle the provisioning and full systems' management it didn't get with the Oblix acquisition, and plays well into its Fusion architecture plans. CA is well positioned in this same space, along with IBM due to its Access360 buy in 2002 and recent acquisition of DataPower.
Joanne over at Secure Enterprise has a great overview of IdM, and you may want to check out our last review of IdM technologies.