IBM Tivoli announced today the acquisition of Access 360, a provider of
provisioning and identity management products and services. The motivation
for the acquisition is straightforward -- to bolster its own fledgling
identity management solutions and perhaps counter an earlier announcement
by Netegrity, Tivoli's chief rival in access management, to move into the
identity management space.

The announcement is significant because it shows the importance of
combining access management with identity management. Identity management
is one of the few areas where a security ROI can be easily documented as it
reduces the need for IT help desk support on mundane items like password
reset.

This announcement really hurts Waveset, Courion, BusinessLayers, and others
who were making a stand-alone play for identity management as separate from
access control. Netegrity, who recently released its own Identity
Management program integrated with Siteminder, will need to step it up a
notch or two to compete effectively with the marketing and consulting depth
and breadth of IBM. One area in particular is platform breadth; the
combined Tivoli Identity Manager/Access 360 product supports Wintel, Unix,
Linux, and the V-Series of mainframe platforms as well as providing agents
to dozens of platforms and applications.

Robert Lonadier, CISSP
President
RCL & Associates
617-576-3363
robert@rcl-associates.com
www.rcl-associates.com

Ó 2002 RCL & Associates, Inc.