With the recent rumors hitting the web suggesting that several large companies including Dell, Microsoft, Oracle, CA and BMC are interested in buying Quest Software, it shows that acquisitions continue to be the easiest way for massive organizations to expand their offerings. Unfortunately, this trend has proven over and over again to weaken innovation and lower the quality of enterprise software offerings.
Regardless of which behemoth wins the battle to acquire Quest, the innovation of Quest’s identity management products could ultimately suffer as efforts are diverted from innovative thinking to company integration. These integration efforts can often take years to accomplish and even after these efforts are complete, the resulting identity access management software solutions may never fully display their past promise as other innovative companies leapfrog their technology during the unrest. Even so, these larger organizations may still be completely satisfied in this sad result as long as they hit their financial targets. In the end, the industry loses.
As the identity management world continues to evolve and businesses continue to find new challenges with compliance and IT cyber security, innovative thinking and agile development becomes paramount. Massive organizations simply cannot adapt to the speed of business change as quickly as a targeted organization because their product lines are overly complex from years of similar acquisitions that have been pulled together with bailing wire and duct tape.
The good news is that innovative thinking continues to flourish at other companies who continue to develop identity and access management products that solve critical issues in order to help reduce risk. Acquisitions like this only make room for focused vendors, with better technology, to become stronger. These companies possess undiluted expert knowledge in their field as well as the agility to move on innovative ideas without needing to worry about broader politics and integration concerns. These are the companies who will move the identity management industry forward and form true partnerships to solve organizational issues.
Follow Ryan Ward, Avatier Chief Innovation Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ryawarr
In the video below, Ryan Ward describes how to return identity and access management to the business using Avatier’s Identity Access Management suite.
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