Recent purchases by BMC and Oracle will trigger further consolidation in the I&AM space.

Back in January, BMC’s acquisition of another I&AM vendor, Calendra, brought directory management and workflow capabilities into BMC’s clutch of I&AM capabilities.

The addition of OpenNetwork to its fold now enables BMC to deliver comprehensive, end-to-end I&AM, which is what many customers prefer. At the time of the Calendra acquisition, it was clear that it had taken BMC some time to select a suitable vehicle with which to extend its presence in the I&AM arena: the company has done well to extend its capabilities so much further with a series of quick deals.

Oracle’s acquisition of Oblix is something quite different in terms of what it says about the purchaser. Even though Oblix is small in size, it is a strategic buy for Oracle and represents a significant step towards providing a complete, integrated and heterogeneous solution in the I&AM space, where it could not previously have been described as a strong vendor. Indeed, Oracle’s previous offerings were more of the order of a necessity within its server and applications products, than means by which customers could knit together their identity infrastructures. However, Oracle has procured a real jewel in Oblix, which was widely seen as having a strong vision of where this market needs to go, and was advanced in terms of its products getting there.

In particular, Oblix had made perhaps more progress towards offering identity-controlled access to Web services than any other vendor that remained independent of the large infrastructure vendors (of whom IBM, CA, and Microsoft have also been active and productive in this area). This will probably be of more use to Oracle than any other feature that it gains with the acquisition – identity will be a key to the problem of how to provide customers with integration between Oracle applications and the recently-acquired PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products.

There are significant benefits for both BMC and Oracle from their acquisitions, and we should expect further vendor consolidation in the I&AM space as others reassess their own positions as a result of these moves.

Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)