IBM’s Tivoli Acquires Access360

IBM’s Tivoli software group continues on its acquisition rampage, adding Access360 to its recent acquisition of storage management software vendor Trellisoft.  Access360, like Trellisoft, is a smallish, privately held firm, so no financial details are available, but in both cases, IBM has decided that going outside beats waiting out the development curve for beefing up its software management portfolio.   That seems wise given that security management software is expected to grow from $550 million, in 2001, to more than $2 billion, in 2006, according to recent research from IDC.

Tivoli’s goal is clearly to be the best integrated systems management offering and Access360 adds substantially to the Tivoli offering in Identity Management. IBM anticipates that the 

Tivoli Identity Manager and enRole will converge, based on their common, underlying Java technology, with enRole as the common basis for the next generation of product and Tivoli function moving into the converged product.  This convergence is expected as early as the first quarter of 2003.

The small firm (128 employees) is a leader in User Provisioning for both internal networks and public offerings.  Based on open standards and Java, Access360 is already supported by more than 70 software and infrastructure vendors, including Verisign.  Its emphasis on user self-care, delegation, and dynamic provisioning will fit easily into IBM’s increased emphasis on its autonomic computing offerings.  It also adds important functions in workflow and report creation.

The Access360 enRole product will immediately be integrated with IBM’s other Tivoli offerings.  IBM’s Global Services will be supporting the new acquisition, world-wide.

IBM notes that how security is purchased is changing.  Traditional security sales, focused on Firewalls and Intruders and managed by the Security Officer, continues to be a good market, but access and privacy concerns, including Identity Management are more of a general concern, managed by business executives.  They are an internal concern rather than a security concern and are very definitely mainstream.

IBM is considering participating in the definition of policy aggregation standards for its new products, which would likely be submitted through OASIS.  Identity management must be supported across entirely heterogeneous environments, including all varieties of Windows and Unix, plus Linux and various IBM mainframe environments.

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