Sun Identity Manager Comes Out On Top

Thanks to Phil Windley for pointing to InfoWorld’s Identity Management Challenge. It’s a thorough comparison of products from six vendors - Courion, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Sun and Thor. I’ll point out that Sun’s Identity Manager is the only product that can answer an unqualified ‘yes’ in each column of the product comparison matrix:

[ **Click for larger view.**](http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/img/41FEidm_ch1.gif)

Here’s the final word from the article:

Sun Identity Manager seemed the most mature overall, with strong integration and management capabilities, but still lacks the reporting and front-end polish we were expecting. IBM and Courion have similar work to do on the manageability front. Indeed, Courion needs to keep working on making the flexibility of its solution more accessible. Novell has paid much attention to its front-end tools, producing the easiest solution to configure and manage by far, but it still needs work on the back end to match the depth of Courion or Thor. Finally, Thor was strong from stem to stern, although their implementation process required a good share of custom coding as well.

I’m sure the Identity Manager engineering team are working on the front end with the Mr Sheen as I type this .