Identity Wars: From Past Battles to the Present Day
The #IdentitySecurity landscape has never been one for the faint hearted. Albert Einstein once said, "if you want to know the future, look at the past."
Palo Alto Networks acquiring CyberArk a few months ago brought back some fond memories of the Identity Wars at the start of this millennium. Friends, mentors and co-workers like Marc van Zadelhoff, Ravi Srinivasan, Joe Anthony, Venkat Raghavan, Patrick R. Wardrop, Kevin Skapinetz, Sridhar Muppidi, Nicholas Harlow, Robin Cohan and so many others including me were right there in the trenches fighting these wars. Looking at the Identity landscape today, few would believe that the undisputed leaders in this space back then - Oracle, IBM and CA Technologies - would make way this rapidly, within 15 years, for the market leaders of today’s era, Okta, CyberArk and SailPoint, who were small, unknown upstarts in the 2000s.
The Genesis of IAM: IBM’s Early Dominance
In many ways, IBM created the IAM market and ignited the arms race for consolidation across the Identity ecosystem. It started with IBM acquiring DASCOM’s Web Access Management solution in 1999 (founded by the truly accomplished, once in a generation Greg Clark), followed by acquisitions of MetaMerge (LDAP Directory Integrator) and Access360 for Provisioning in 2002 - all this while I was still a sophomore studying computer science at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.
Aggression and Consolidation: The Oracle & CA Campaigns
Flush with cash, CA saw an opportunity to enter into this space, and it did precisely that with a splash by acquiring Netegrity in 2004 to enter into the Web Access Management space. Oracle’s aggressive acquisitive growth strategy has always been one for the books, and their M&A moves mid decade truly exemplified that aggression. Oracle entered into this space in 2005 with the acquisitions of Oblix (Web Access Management), Thor (Provisioning, Identity Management), OctetString (Virtual Directory), Bharosa (2007, MFA, Risk based Access), BridgeStream (2007, Role Engineering & Mgmt) and PassLogix in 2010. I can only imagine the excitement in this part of Oracle's business driven by leaders like Amit Jasuja and others.
The Final Hail Mary and the Rise of IDaaS
Cut to 2008, and IBM stepped in to acquire Encentuate (founded by the visionary Peng T. Ong; I was one of the early engineers there) and ended its acquisition spree with CrossIdeas (Identity Governance) and Lighthouse in 2014, which was IBM’s attempt to respond to the IDaaS revolution that Okta was leading in. Meanwhile XCeedium was CA’s final hail mary before it finally was absorbed into Broadcom.
The Pattern Repeats: Architectures Create New Winners
Transformative, foundational architectures and technologies create new winners who consolidate to create new platforms. Oracle, IBM and CA were the authoritative platforms of the Servers era. Okta, CyberArk and SailPoint have been the winners for the cloudnative era. And the AInative era has just begun…
