I
had an illuminating discussion yesterday with Dan Greff and Jess Moore regarding
Neogent’s Velocity
Identity Package (VIP) methodology and technology for accelerating deployment
of Sun’s Identity
Manager product. I had seen an earlier presentation and demonstration of
the system, but the vision began to click during our discussion at the Phoenix
Airport Marriott hotel. (By the way, the cobb salad is excellent.)

We all know that implementing Identity Management systems can be costly and
time consuming. The extreme flexibility of the Sun Identity Manager product
comes with a price – skilled, experienced engineers are required for system
definition, configuration and deployment. That fact begs at least three questions
for customers: How can deployment be simplified? How can known best practices
be re-used? How can a mid-market company reap the rewards of Identity Management
without paying a large-market price?

Neogent was one of Waveset’s
earliest integration partners. With many successful Identity Manager implementations
under their belts, they kept asking themselves a couple of important questions:
How can we leverage our expertise to produce more systems more quickly? How
can we open the mid-market to effective Identity Manager deployments?

The Neogent VIP system blends methodology and technology to bring the Identity
Manager product to mid market companies by leveraging known best practices discovered
through in the trenches experience.

Using the VIP methodology, Neogent consultants lead customers through a modelling
exercise, using a familiar actor and use-case paradigm. Customers select from
a set of standard actors and use-cases and specify appropriate configuration
attributes. Rather than conducting traditional open-end requirements analyses
that frequently define complex and expensive systems, the VIP approach constrains
the requirements definition to variations of known best practices.

The VIP technology then uses the captured requirements to generate the XML
objects that form the core configuration of the Identity Manager system. This
jump-starts the configuration effort and sharply reduces implementation time.

Using the VIP methodology/technology blend, Neogent can offer full Identity
Manager implementations on a fixed price basis at significantly lower price
points than allowed by traditional methods.

What’s the catch? If your company isn’t willing to bend its business practices
to fit within the standard constraints defined by Neogent, you will still wind
up requiring significant custom configuration work anyway. If you want to take
advantage of the extreme flexibility of the Identity Manager product, you will
need to follow a more traditional approach.

However, if you need rapid deployment with a prescribed set of best practices,
the VIP methodology and technology shows interesting promise.

Tags:
Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Sun Microsystems
Neogent
Dan Greff
Jess Moore
Waveset
Nethodology