Gartner MQ for User Provisioning published – Oracle Named “Leader”

I have been neglecting this blog for a while, and it took an event of historic importance to pull me out of my reverie and back into the blogosphere. No, I am not talking of the arrival on this earth of Suri Cruise. It was the eagerly anticipated publication of Gartner’s magic quadrant on User Provisioning (or UP as it is called in the report).

OK, so maybe it isn’t quite so earth-shattering an event, but for some of us at Thor, the waiting had turned into our own little episode of “Waiting for Godot”, complete with conspiracy theories and other shenanigans. And the naming of Oracle as a “leader” in the space made the wait all the more worthwhile (though bittersweet, cause we sure could have used this while we were still Thor). It makes for an interesting read, so check it out.

Some things I found really interesting were:

• A pointed acknowledgement of the politics that goes into provisioning projects, which can be extremely painful (wanna see my scars?)
• An interesting division of approaches into middleware and access management approaches, with Microsoft the lone (major) advocate of the latter
• The lack of any “visionaries” in the quadrant (I may have something to say about that!)
• Microsoft being categorized as a niche player (imagine that!), probably because of their approach
• Their statement that Oracle’s IAM road map “looks the best of all vendors” (go team)

In the coming weeks I will devote some posts to talking about some of the topics and perspectives that Gartner had in their paper.