"Unfortunately the company you work for is a competitor . . ."
Next week I attend Digital ID World, an identity funfest in Anaheim, CA. One of the great aspects of this event is the interaction of customers, vendors and analysts. That said, a strange thing occurred earlier in the week that really shocked me. A Sun colleague working on OpenSSO with me tried to register for a Monday workshop entitled "Enterprise Role Management Workshop: Leveraging Roles For Successful Identity Governance" and received an email back from Sailpoint stating . . .
"Unfortunately, the company you work for is a competitor of the sponsor for the Monday afternoon workshop, therefore we cannot allow your admittance to the session."
Really!?!?!? My first reaction was WOAH! My second reaction was to laugh and realize this is why open source is so much better than proprietary solutions. With OpenSSO we'll let you in, we'll let you download the product, we'll show you the source - hell, we'll even let you submit fixes! Sailpoint, I personally invite any member of your organization to attend any of our OpenSSO workshops or events. In fact, I strongly believe that your participation would lead to a better dialogue and serve the attendees better.
Tear down that wall!
Daniel, please join us for a bloggers' face-to-face Monday night on the exhibit floor:
http://360tek.blogspot.com/2008/08/digital-id-world-bloggers-unite.html
Leave a comment if you can make it.
Posted by Matt Flynn on September 04, 2008 at 06:44 AM PDT #
Daniel
I think it's fair to offer another viewpoint to this discussion. I'll preface this by saying that FPG does business with both Sun and SailPoint, and as such we understand and respect both companies. I believe it is accurate to say that early innovation of Sun's products was proprietary, that is, done in house and funded by Sun. Sun was to be commended for leveraging open standards where they existed, and offering technology components as defacto standards where they didn't, eg.: NFS, NEWS, Java. Eventually Solaris became Open Solaris, but that took a while. Not unlike Sun, SailPoint initiated the Open Role Exchange where it was clear that standards did not exist.
Secondly, it isn't valid to compare OpenSSO with products like ComplianceIQ, Role Manager, or Identity Manager for that matter. The open sourcing of SSO enabled innovation in product execution (eg the Fedlet component - brilliant!), as opposed to innovation in product formulation. According to Burton and Gartner, all products in this category (IDA or Identity Intelligence) remain in their early phase of development and takeup. Thus I think it's entirely fair to exclude competitors from sessions at DIDW and other such events. While SailPoint and Sun share common vision and DNA to some extent, the two companies are competitors, and that's commercial reality.
To Sun and SailPoint - please keep doing what you're doing. Competition drives innovation and Customers are the winners.
Cheers
John
Posted by John Havers on September 05, 2008 at 06:28 PM PDT #
Hi John,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I guess we're going to have to respectively disagree. You describe Sun's move towards open source nicely, but we've evolved quite a ways from there. We've developed opends, glassfush, metro, openesb and many other products from inception in open source. Within OpenSSO we can say the same for our federation capabilities, web services security and our entitlements management capability. The Fedlet, one of our most recent innovations and a kay differentiator for us, is another great example. I'm short, I've learned through open source development that many of the fears you highlight are not real threats and that innovation needs to be continual to stay ahead.
Finally, a strong competitive advantage is not only innovative, but difficult to copy. I can't imagine that a workshop at DIDW is going to provide enough detail that Sun will be stealing any trade secrets. Anyhoo, that's just one opinion. Again, I appreciate the thoughtful response and would love to read what others think.
Posted by daniel on September 05, 2008 at 08:52 PM PDT #