Matt's back! Matt is an Identity Management consultant who had the pleasure of working with me at MaXware. (oops - should I have said that the other way around?) Matt has since went into the consulting world and MaXware has since been sold to SAP. SAP has a short white paper describing their SAP NetWeaver Identity Management capabilities. Matt is now focusing on providing Identity Management services to SAP customers. That sounds like a good place to be. If you're an SAP customer or an SAP consultancy looking for expertise in the old MaXware identity stack, you might want to introduce yourself to Mr. Pollicove and start reading his blog for interesting info on SAP identity issues (no pressure Matt). You can also look back in my archives (most of 2006) for more info and interesting uses of SAP's metadirectory, virtual directory and provisioning technologies.
I've spoken to at least two IdM consultancies who are considering building an SAP practice. I think it makes a lot of sense. If you're in this space or building an SAP identity practice, feel free to leave a comment here and let us know about it.
5 comments:
Thanks, Matt! I'm very excited to be actively back in the identity conversation.
mp
Matt,
I appreciate your blog and look forward to reading more.
I know you have experience with Maxware, but if you could take a broader view -- it is very difficult to find anyone in the U.S. market who has implemented or wants to implement SAP Identity Center. And now you see a Novell and SAP announcement on identity management. SAP doesn't even many consultants in the U.S. with the expertise. Where do you see SAP heading?
Well, if I comment, I would only be pontificating. But here goes... As I wrote before, I don't see SAP as a company that would market stand-alone utilities for IdM. We know that they have baked the MaXware products into NetWeaver and that they don't have much of an IdM salesforce. As you point out, the Novell announcement does seem to suggest that SAP is not looking to own enterprise IdM. So, my guess is that Identity Center will become a feature of NetWeaver that enables SAP customers to easily integrate SAP with other systems. But, SAP will not look to be an IdM solution provider for non-SAP customers. And, SAP probably won't even try to be the enterprise IdM vendor for its own customers.
But, the MaXware capabilities are still in there, so I think at this point, it's up to SAP customers to determine where this goes. If they demand that SAP provides an enterprise class IdM solution as part of the stack, then it could happen.
Also, the Novell announcement could just be like the variety of SSO vendors who have a partnership with RSA for strong authentication even though RSA has an SSO product. Novell seems to have built some nice functionality around SAP and could just be highlighting that regardless of SAP's internal capabilities.
Congrats to Matt P
Thanks Matt F for maintaining a great identity blog
I agree the lack of internal SAP resources will impede some efforts to market and sell an alternative SAP brand of IDM.
Might suggest that this is good news for the identity consultants who can now go to any existing SAP customer and provide an ERP identity solution approved by SAP. Integration to existing SUN/AD/... identity data environments is suplemented, not supplanted
I'm looking for information about referenceable US based accounts using SAP IDM. There seems to be a lot of good technology (from Maxware, new federation capabilities, etc.).
Best regards,
Bob Brandt
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