Identity Management Services Company Acquisition

I posted a few probing questions a while back regarding the Identity Management services market. Today, I read an interesting press release with the heading :

"Novacoast Announces Acquisition of eNvision Data Solutions, LLC"

Some excerpts below:

Novacoast, Inc., an IT professional services firm announces the acquisition of eNvision Data Solutions, LLC. eNvision, a systems integrator in Philadelphia, has served Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 2001. eNvision's core competence is in identity management, Linux, and Open Enterprise Server...

Paul Anderson, President and CEO of Novacoast said, "Our attention is constantly focused on acquiring the best engineering skill sets and delivering those skills to the market. Our acquisition of eNvision gives us top engineering skills in identity management and Linux.

So, this is some pretty interesting stuff. You don't hear of Identity Management professional services companies acquisitions every day. We've become accustomed to hearing about product companies getting acquired (there was another one by the way...Entrust announced its picking up Business Signatures on the 19th of this month) - but services companies haven't been having the same excitement. A few more of these, and things might start getting exciting. (At least for us!)

Technorati tags: Identity Management, Acquisition, Novacoast, eNvision, Novell, Entrust, Business Signatures

Excellent Blog for Entrepreneurs on Fund Raising

An excellent blog I've been frequenting lately is www.bostonvcblog.com by Jeff Bussgang. Besides the fact that he was part of some pretty large startups (Upromise) - he gives some excellent insight into the whole fund raising process. The best part of the blog is that Jeff doesnt shy away from giving numbers, percentages and the like...you know, the questions that really matter. He also discusses the mindset of VCs and entrepreneurs, and the possible clashes that could occur. Anyhow, I'll leave you with an excerpt to give you a taste and illustrate his insight into the numbers, but you should go take a look for yourselves:

...Let’s do the math on an example to see how this plays out. Let's say an entrepreneur owns 10% of their VC-backed start-up and someone comes and offers them $100 million. Thus, they stand to make $10 million if they proceed with the sale. Let's say a VC fund owns 20% and thus will take away $20 million, but assume they’ve invested $5 million already in the company, yielding a net capital gain of $15 million. Further, let’s say the VC’s “carried interest” is 20%. Therefore, the general partners of the fund take home $3 million. Let’s say there are 6 partners that split the carry evenly – that’s $500k for each general partner...

Technorati tags: Identity Management, VC, Fund Raising, Startup

ITIL and IDM Buzz (HP, BMC and Courion)

I just read a pretty interesting post by Archie Reed on HP utilizing identity management to align the enterprise with ITIL objectives via automation (or aligning ITIL and IdM through automation). The example he gives is self service password management.

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a framework of best-practices focused on service delivery. Perhaps that is too broad a definition, but a good place to read about it is here.

The last time I remember ITIL and IdM used together was by BMC's VP, Somesh Singh. In this article (back in December), he stated:

“Technology solutions that build and maintain an IT infrastructure are no longer sufficient. Customers now need to be able to demonstrate business value of investment in their IT infrastructure, only BMC offers a suite of solutions founded on the principles of ITIL and Business Service Management,”

Although he didn't focus on automation as Archie did, nonetheless he brought ITIL into the IdM scene. BMC claims its Identity Compliance Manager is rooted in ITIL principles, and is "a graphical dashboard to report on policy compliance." So obvious, the slant here is towards compliance instead of automation, but a relation exists nonetheless. This kind of intrigued me, so I decided to do a few searches on it, and I found that Courion is polling its clients about usage of ITIL and COBIT. From their press release on their Converge conference this year, the following quote is relevant:

"When asked about best practice methodologies their organizations are undertaking today, thirty-two percent identified ITIL while twenty-one percent identified COBIT; eleven percent identified both. When participants were asked if their organizations found ITIL or COBIT to be beneficial to their risk management, governance, and compliance initiatives, sixty-four percent were not certain about ITIL, while sixty-two percent found COBIT to be beneficial. Thirty-two percent responded that their organizations are not using a best practice methodology."

Interesting, considering they recently launched a Compliance tool and Role Management tool. It seems to me that as the market completes deployments on Password Management and Provisioning implementations, and starts making Role Management and Compliance Management a reality - ITIL and COBIT will become more relevant to the identity discussions.

Technorati tags: Identity Management, ITIL, IDM, COBIT, HP, BMC, Courion

EMC's Justification for RSA Acquisition

According to a number of reports, EMC has been getting criticism from investors and Wall Street regarding the whole RSA buy.
EMC's Rob Sadowski explains their reasoning for purchasing RSA by describing the storage market moving towards "holisitic" information management which is accomplished by Identity Management technologies. So instead of writing their own identity tools, why not buy and beat competitors to it?
Rob's analysis holds some truth. Think about Sun's integration of their storage and identity products earlier this year.
So does this mean we will see more storage and identity companies forging relationships?