The Forrester Wave™: Identity And Access Management, Q4 2009

In Forrester's 79-criteria evaluation of identity and access management (IAM) vendors, we found that Oracle, CA, and IBM lead the pack because of a rich IAM portfolio (both organically developed and acquired), an understanding of a rapidly changing market, and a strong and meticulously executed strategy. Novell, Courion, and Sun Microsystems each have powerful suites and strong provisioning and role-management solutions but lack some pieces of the access management stack. Microsoft, SAP, and Hitachi ID Systems lag behind because they cannot provide a full IAM stack. Given that many customers ask about only the provisioning portion of the IAM stack, we also used a subset of the criteria to evaluate this subcomponent. When evaluating these same vendors on their provisioning products, we found that CA, Novell, and Courion showed significant improvement in their current offering; however, Oracle still maintained the top spot for provisioning.