Andre Durand: It’s interesting to me how all of the AAA vendors have scouped up provisioning companies in the last 18 months. I hear through the grapevine that provisioning products are ‘selling like hotcakes’, while traditional AAA grows at a 3% rate annually.

What’s funny about this is that AAA vendors have traditionally sold the value of their products on the merit that having identity, authentication and authorization policy in one location, saying that this is more secure and easier to manage than keeping identity embedded in every application. Yet provisioning products do little to forward this cause, but instead provide a band-aide for dealing with reality of decentralized and unconnected identity as it exists today.



As enterprise struggles with entropy, products which deal with today’s heterogenous and distributed nature will continue to do well. This speaks well to the future of identity federation (loosely coupled identity systems).



More here.