Mobile Device Management - Part II

In October, I blogged about Mobile Device Management and I was thinking aloud about how a traditional IDM product can add-on a new feature to provision to a MDM product.

  

The next feature will definitely be able to bridge the gap between identities from enterprise customers (most likely, in-house Microsoft Active Directory) and MDM products. I do not think we should cross the path of building a MDM product from scratch. That would be too far-fetching. 

This would be a one-stop solution.

This morning, an email came from SailPoint announcing the release of IdentityIQ 6.2. 

Dream comes true! Yes, indeed.

Highlights of what’s included in the new release:

• First of its kind integration with mobile device management (MDM) solutions from AirWatch, Good and MobileIron
• Re-styled user interface with crisp, clean look-and-feel
• Expanded scalability support for critical IAM processes
• Enhanced administrative user experience with improvements to workflow and quick link configuration
• Separation-of-duty (SoD) policy simulation
• End user tablet support (iPad)
• Integration support for STEALTHbits, Cyber-Ark and Microsoft FIM
• Expanded healthcare integration with Epic & GE Centricity connectors

These days, any IAMS product will want to get "friendly" with mobile devices. Why not? It's a super huge market in the mobile space.

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ForgeRock BackStage

I just came back from a 10-day holiday in New Zealand. Amazing place to be in! The scenery is best to none!

And I did a 32-km trail run on a sunny Saturday morning last weekend - The Great Cranleigh Kauri Run. Awesome view when I ran on the ridge!

By the way, I came back last night and received an email from ForgeRock Support. 

The BackStage has gone LIVE! BackStage is the new Customer Portal from ForgeRock. 

BackStage is the first step in providing a new level of service engagement between ForgeRock and our customers. It brings together our key online customer services into a single convenient location so that you will find your downloads, support tickets and product enhancement requests all in one place. The existing download site will be merged into the customer portal and as a subscription customer you will also be able to gain access to maintenance downloads and any critical or security patches available for your products.

  

BackStage also introduces a support ticket wizard to help you create tickets that more accurately reflect the nature of your problem, leading to a more efficient support process and hopefully a speedier conclusion. BackStage will also allow you to view your open support tickets; selecting a ticket will take you directly into the support system allowing you to view and update the ticket as usual.

To my customers, what is most important is Patches! :)

This is what matters to them most and this is exactly what they are paying for - timely patches for their mission-critical 24/7 Identity and Access Management System.

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Mobile Device Management

I blogged about New Paradigm for the Modern Web few months ago when I came back from ForgeRock Open Identity Summit in San Francisco. 

Few weeks after I came back from the US, I attended the 1st Compuware APM User Conference in Singapore. I then blogged about New Paradigm for the Modern Web - Part II. 

I concluded that Cloud, Mobile, Social is not going to go away anytime soon. They will just get bigger, and we should better prepared ourselves for them.

Mobile - yes, this is the tiny little gadget that is getting very hot these days. Every company is finding ways to have corporate applications installed on the mobile devices so as to increase the productivity and mobility of their workforce. 

But security is the top issue. 

This morning, I came across an article from Citrix and looked further into XenMobile.

XenMobile delivers enterprise grade MDM with role-based management, configuration, security and support for corporate and employee-owned devices. Users enroll their devices, enabling IT to provision policies and apps to those devices automatically, blacklist or whitelist apps, detect and protect against jailbroken devices, troubleshoot device and app issues, and wipe or selectively wipe a device that is lost, stolen or out of compliance. Users can use any device they choose, while IT can ensure compliance of corporate assets and secure corporate content on the device.

This is the Mobile Device Management (MDM) offering from Citrix. Quite typical of any MDM product out there in the market.


But XenMobile attempts to offer more features…

The XenMobile App Controller is a SAML-compliant identity provider that connects to the enterprise directory, reads the authorization policies configured and provides the appropriate secure SAML tokens for user sign-on to federation-enabled applications. To interoperate with older applications that do not support SAML, XenMobile can act as a password manager, storing user credentials and providing them securely so users don’t have to remember their app credentials. Built into XenMobile is a long list of “connectors” for applications that have all the required interaction logic leveraging APIs that the applications expose; for example, APIs to create user accounts within those applications based on authorization policies. With App Controller, authorized applications are exposed to users through Worx Home, forming an enterprise app store and providing users a single place to authenticate and get access to all their enterprise applications. 

Pretty cool.

This gets me thinking … currently, we have ForgeRock Bridge SPE (of course, there is now the famous SalesForce Identity Connect) that helps Cloud Service Providers to federate identities between enterprise customers and the services they offer.

The next feature will definitely be able to bridge the gap between identities from enterprise customers (most likely, in-house Microsoft Active Directory) and MDM products. I do not think we should cross the path of building a MDM product from scratch. That would be too far-fetching.

This would be a one-stop solution.

Just my thought. What's your view?


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Commercial Open Source from ForgeRock

A check with Wikipedia refers Commercial Open Source as follows:

This model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software, or offering other services for the open source version in a similar manner.

In short, potential customers need to understand Commercial Open Source != Open Source.


I do not understand why there is no question asked when customers purchase Linux Operating Systems from RedHat.

However, when it comes to asking for a subscription from any of ForgeRock Open Identity Stack, there will be a long list of questions. :)

The only reason I can think of is the subscription for ForgeRock Open Identity Stack will never be as cheap as that for RedHat Operating System, for the same number of users. Come on, let's compare apple-with-apple. How can one compare an Operating System with a Identity Management software?

Instead, customers should at least ring up the sales from similar Identity Management companies and get quotations from them. Then, sit down and be amazed by how relatively cheaper is the subscription from ForgeRock.  (Well, sometimes it might not be cheaper. Customers need to compare features-by-features as well.) 

The point is to compare an apple with an apple. And then features by features.


Recently, there is this article on the web where the U.S. Department of Defense made their stand on Open Source software.

It is clear that even the organisation that requires the most secured environment in the world does not oppose to using Open Source software. (as long as there is commercial support for the Open Source software, i supposed. Make sense?)


I like to flash the following to potential customers showing them the differences it make when one subscribe to ForgeRock support.

We are now talking about support for Enterprise-ready products  - real Identity Management software for the Enterprise for every day use ... 24x7.

Not forgetting there is this trend of deploying the Open Identity Stack for the Modern Web, which is a huge deployment on the cloud for millions of users. How can one go about deploying the Open Identity Stack without valid subscriptions? :>

Lastly, I like to congratulate ForgeRock on their new WINS which was recently announced in the ForgeRock European Summit!

GEICO, a recent win, has a really huge OpenAM deployment out there. (I will definitely get a case study from my counterpart in ForgeRock for GEICO) 

Thomson Reuters has been a long-time customer of ForgeRock using OpenAM and has recently migrated all their Sun Directory Servers to OpenDJ.

SalesForce - do I need to say much? :>  Read here.

McKesson has deployed various OpenAM/OpenDJ/OpenIdM solutions to the healthcare systems in the United States.


The big names are paying for ForgeRock subscriptions. They do value the support services that ForgRock provides.


So, is Commercial Open Source == Open Source?


Think again!

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Salesforce Identity Connect . ForgeRock Bridge SPE

Here I am attending ForgeRock European Summit in France this week, and I am glad Salesforce has chosen ForgeRock Bridge Service Provider Edition (Bridge SPE) to deliver Salesforce Identity Connect to create a bridge between existing on-premise directory solutions and Salesforce.

You can read the press release here. 

This is great! The momentum has finally caught on... Time to move faster! :)

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