Sun Microsystems earlier this month announced that it had been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant for identity management in Gartner's recently published User Provisioning Magic Quadrant report for the first half of 2006.
Companies are placed in the "Leaders" quadrant based on a combination of their 'completeness of vision' and 'ability to execute'.
Mark Ehmke, Software Sales Regional Manager at Sun Microsystems sub-Saharan Africa, says this news provides further testimony to Sun's leadership in the identity management market.
"Sun has been cited as a leader in numerous other recent identity management analyst reports," he says, "most notably in the Forester Wave on User Account Provisioning, Q1 2006; the Meta Group's 2005 METAspectrum - Identity Management; and a recent InfoWorld shoot-out. With the Gartner report, however, Sun is now being recognised as the undisputed market leader," he says.
"Although other vendors have been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant, Sun clearly outstrips them on both the 'completeness of vision' and 'ability to execute' axes," he explains.
"In terms of vision, Sun was the first to converge user provisioning, access management and identity auditing together with a meta-directory solution to create a complete end-to-end identity management solution. Sun's success is based on its non-intrusive approach of implementing an 'agentless' model. In a nutshell, this means our solution can be managed centrally without disrupting the client's IT environment. Together with Sun's relentless pursuit of standards-based solutions, it means the customer never feels they are being painted into the corner, like some other, more proprietary, solutions," he says.
"Sun's commitment is to offer identity management solutions that let companies make security a seamless part of their business in ways that help them unlock value and make money," comments Sarah Gates, Vice-President of Identity Management at Sun Microsystems.
A massive contributor to Sun's success in the identity management market, Ehmke continues, is the fact that its solutions have achieved awesome market penetration over the past year.
"We are continuously increasing our market share. The identity management space is still relatively young and we realise that we must keep our eye on the ball if we are to maintain our leadership position," Ehmke says.
Ehmke says the majority of the customers Sun is currently engaging with in South Africa rank prominently in the top 100 organisations list. "We're expecting to see massive traction in this market space before the end of the year," he concludes.
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