Oracle Identity Management Event
Our Oracle DBA asked me to attend as they’re a bit unhappy with the way I’m nailing our DB with my Novell IDM solution, and they’re convinced that Oracle can do it better…
3rd day this week I’m attending a conference at the Hilton, this being one of those sit down breakfast events. The first speaker, Danny Ilic, did a fantastic presentation on why IAM is becoming important, and why IAM is not a 30 day project. I must say given the numbers and timeframe he mentioned it seems as if my implementation has gone pretty well so far, but there’s always more work to be done.
Patrick Mclaughlin presented Oracle’s vision of end-to-end security, or “here’s the Oracle products to use to implement a security architecture in your company”. Good presentation, and as expected, a lot of Oracle promotion in there.
Although both presenters were good, especially Danny, I still left the event feeling robbed. I expected to hear why I should drop every single other IAM product suite and use Oracle’s because of the following ground breaking product features you’ll ONLY find in the Oracle tools. Instead I heard the same basic conceptual principles of IAM and why I need to do it and how I should go about it – aboslutely nothing mentioned about Oracle’s IAM features and benefits.
Given that there is still so much confusion in the IAM space Oracle clearly meant to educate and influence potential customers as to the need to roll out an IAM project as opposed to doing a full blown promotion of their IAM suite. Perhaps that’s why they supplied a CD filled with white papers and demos along with the addicitive mints…
Tags: Conference
Hmm, changing IAM products based on DB performance seems strange. Have the DBA’s fiddled with the indexing, caching and connection pooling settings first? Even then, there are other options such as upping the DB HW specs or replicating identity info to a separate DB dedicated to IAM. All of the above would be much cheaper than a new IAM implementation.
There’s currently no serious consideration to toss our Novell implementation, but the (Oracle) DBA’s do like to joke about it…
Our DB is my authoritative source for the majority of our identity attributes, and the data structures used to extract the desired information in one go is pretty heavy, albeit well optimized.
It’s a balancing act between expected service levels and system impact on overall performance – but that is the price you pay for having all your information originate in external systems.