A New Resource for Comparing IAM Vendors: The 2016 IAM Fact Book

The business world has changed dramatically in the last decade. Many organizations are now managing employee and consumer identity at a scale that seemed unimaginable 10 years ago. Today, organizations of all sizes are finding that their good old-fashioned manual IAM processes are insufficiently automated, unscalable, and frankly, insecure.

Cue the process of seeking out, evaluating, choosing, purchasing, and implementing an IAM solution. But there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to identity management. Solutions come in a variety of flavors—IAM, Identity and Access Governance (IGA), Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), Identity as a Service (IDaaS)— each with a specific set of capabilities, strengths, and drawbacks. Choosing the right solution and vendor for you is a complicated process—one that requires in-depth research and often comes down to more than just the solutions and its technical capabilities.

Here at Solutions Review, it’s our job to help simplify that process. To that end, we’ve created a variety of resources and articles to speed the evaluation of enterprise technology solutions. In our Identity Management Buyer’s Guide, first introduced in 2013 and now in its third iteration, we offer readers a full IAM market overview. This includes company and product profiles and best use cases for the top 28 vendors, 10 questions for prospective IAM buyers, and a full-length glossary of the top IAM terms and acronyms.

Today, the Solutions Review team is happy to introduce another buyer’s resource to simplify the vendor selection process: The 2016 IAM Fact book.

The 2016 IAM Fact Book represents a different approach to vendor evaluation. We’ve gathered all those facts and practical details that don’t quite bear on the evaluation of vendor’s technology but are of equal importance when selecting technology partners. Namely, the IAM Fact book provides valuable insight into the business success and long-term viability of your potential technology partners.

In this report, you’ll find vital data on each company’s maturity and longevity, business model, size, geographic reach, workforce, and more. Statistics reported include:

• Revenue
• Fundraising
• Number of Employees
• Average Client User Base
• Notable Clients
• And More

Taken alone, these may seem like unimportant statistics, far flung from the process of technology evaluation. But together, these facts paint a valuable picture of one of the most important factors in considering technology partners: their long-term viability.

After all, you need to make sure that your prospective partner is going to be around in five years time. Beyond that, you need to know that they’ll be able to provide you with the level of service and support you need, when and where you need it.

For example, if you’re planning on opening a Chinese office in 2018, you’ll likely want a vendor with a presence in the Asia Pacific region. Likewise, the number of employees a company has can give a decent idea of the level of support you can expect, and the sort of clients they’ve worked with in the past will give you a pretty solid idea whether their product is the right fit for you.

Of course, as with anything, there are exceptions—the startup with the most Series A funding isn’t always the one that makes it big, and, as we all know, the multinational corporation with the most employees isn’t always the one with the best customer service. But on the whole, we believe that these metrics are only surpassed in importance by the capabilities of the vendor’s products, and provide a valuable insight into the evaluation process.

IAM vendors covered in the 2016 IAM Fact Book include: Alert Enterprise!, Avatier, Beta Systems, Bitium, CA Technologies, Centrify, Courion, Covisint, Dell, Fischer International, ForgeRock, Hitachi ID, IBM, Ilantus, iWelcome, Microsoft Azure AD, NetIQ, Okta, Omada, OneLogin, Oracle, Ping Identity, RSA, Sailpoint, Salesforce Identity, SAP, Simeio, and UnboundID.

If you find yourself looking for a more in-depth, technical breakdown of vendor’s offerings, consider downloading our 2016 IAM Buyer’s Guide. For those researching IAM as part of an active purchasing initiative, The 2016 IAM Buyer’s Guide offers ten questions to ask both yourself and prospective solution providers before a purchase as well as detailed profiles of the top 28 IAM products (the most ever included in our IAM guide) as selected by Solutions Review. Each profile provides a company and solution backgrounds, highlights solution key features, and gives the Solutions Review’s take on each solution.

For those researching IAM as part of an active purchasing initiative, The 2016 IAM Buyer’s Guide offers ten questions to ask both yourself and prospective solution providers before a purchase as well as detailed profiles of the top 28 IAM products (the most ever included in our IAM guide) as selected by Solutions Review. Each profile provides a company and solution backgrounds, highlights solution key features, and gives the Solutions Review’s take on each solution.

The report also includes a current overview of the Identity Management space along with five questions to ask yourself and five questions to ask a potential vendor to assist you in any future sales calls or demos. On top of that, we’ve thrown in the IAM Glossary for reference, with over 50 of the top IAM terms and acronyms defined.

If you’re in the beginning process of buying your first Identity Management solution, or if you’re looking for something a little different than what you already have, we hope this is the perfect resource to get you started on the decision-making process.

You can download the 2016 Fact Book in full here, and the Buyer’s Guide here.

We’ve always got something new cooking over here, so keep your eyes open for the forthcoming 2016 IAM Solutions Comparison Matrix, which will provide a side-by-side comparison of top IAM solutions, their capabilities, connectors, compliance, and more.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff Edwards
Editor
Solutions Review