Identity Management Heats Up

Software vendors are dangling big financial carrots in front of their rivals customers in an attempt to win a share of the growing identity management market.

As enterprise IT systems become increasingly complex, handling who gets access to what is becoming a major headache for firms. But it is also big business. Computer Associates International Inc. (CA)’s (NYSE: CA) decision to shell out $430 million on security specialist Netegrity has prompted a flurry of activity from rival vendors keen to get a share of the action (see CA Nets Netegrity for $430M).

Yesterday Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) made a bold move to lure Netegrity customers onto its own OpenView identity management platform, offering discounts of up to 80 percent. HP is even offering the chance of complementary consulting services (see HP Offers Identity Mgt Trade Up ).

But the Palo Alto, Calif., firm is not the only major vendor sweet-talking Netegrity users. Within hours of CA announcing its planned acquisition of Netegrity, Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) made its own attempt to woo the security vendor’s customers onto its own Access Manager platform (see Sun Migrates Identity Management).

Why all the fuss? Identity management, notes Jonathan Penn, analyst at Forrester Research Inc., "is certainly emerging as a standard endeavor within IT. It’s a big deal.”