Oracle has completed their acquisition of Sun. During a live webcast on the 27th of January Oracle announced their intentions for the major Sun product lines including Sun Identity Manager. You can find archives of many of the webcasts at Oracle’s Sun Product Strategy site.
The first thing I noted was that Oracle does not intend to continue developing the current Sun Identity Manager product line. In their words: “Oracle Identity Manager is the strategic product for identity administration.” They pledged long term support for Sun Identity Manager 8.1 through to December 2014, extended support to December 2017 and “indefinite” sustaining support. Oracle mentioned they plan on providing tools to upgrade from Sun Identity Manager to Oracle Identity Manager. The only mention of what specific Sun Identity Manager technology was to be integrated into Oracle Identity Manager was the encrypted non-reputable audit logging and the integrated IDE. There was no mention of the other technologies within Sun Identity Manager such as Xpress or the forms.
Sun Role Manager is Oracle’s strategic product for Identity Governance. So it will be interesting to see how what is now Sun Role Manager is integrated into the new Oracle Identity Manager with whatever bits of Sun Identity Manager is left.
Oracle is re-branding all the current Sun identity products:
- Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition becomes Oracle Directory Server Enterprise Edition.
- Sun Role Manager becomes Oracle Identity Analytics.
- Sun Identity Manager becomes Oracle Waveset. (This is likely to keep it very far away, in marketing terms, from the current Oracle Identity Manager.)
- Sun OpenSSO Enterprise becomes Oracle OpenSSO Enterprise.
The last Sun webinar archive I viewed, only a week ago, about the integration between Sun IDM 8.1 Patch 7 and Sun Role Manager had a Q&A chat log with some of the product managers. They indicated that the intention was to release Sun IDM 9.0 in Q2 of this year. What that means for the newly branded Oracle Waveset product is anyone’s guess.
Finally, the webcast indicated that anyone with a perpetual license will receive credit towards Oracle Fusion. How much credit? Who knows…
What does this mean going forward? Well, that’s up to your organization. Years ago, my organization initially went with Sun Identity Manager 6 because the feature set appeared strong. The other reason had to do with cost, Oracle’s product was simply too expensive at the time. Are we going to migrate to Oracle’s Identity Manager? I don’t know. We’ve been in maintenance-only mode with Sun Identity Manager ever since Oracle’s announcement that they were going to purchase Sun. So while we have new development work just waiting to be completed we are definitely going to be looking at alternatives to Oracle. It’s been a bumpy road…
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One Comment
There has been some communication from Oracle that the Sun Identity Manager product will have no new releases (i.e. 9.0). Their continuation of support for Sun products does not require them to improve the current Sun IdM 8.1 product in any way. I believe that only a strong customer message to Oracle that this is not acceptable will change Oracle’s mind and force them to continue the development of the Sun IdM product at least in the short term. This is what happened when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and that product has continued to be fixed and enhanced.