Part of fixing any IT issue is finding the right solution for the problem and ensuring the issue will not happen again. One of the major struggles for the IT industry is finding the right vendors to enlist as protectors.

KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass report on access management and federation aims to close the gap between the right solution and the right vendor.

Emerging business requirements, such as onboarding business partners, providing customer access to services and adopting new cloud services, require IT to react and find solutions to these communications and collaboration conditions. Access management and federation vendors are closing in to address these needs and enable business agility.

With many vendors in this market segment, the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass provides a view and analysis of the leading vendors and their strengths and weaknesses. The report acts as a guide for the consumer to compare product features and individual product requirements.

Read the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass report

Breaking Down the Leadership Ratings

When evaluating the different vendors and products, KuppingerCole looked into the aspects of overall functionality, size of the company, number of customers, number of developers, partner ecosystems, licensing models and platform support. Specific features, such as federation inbound, federation outbound, backend integration, adaptive authentication, registration, user stories, security models, deployment models, customization and multitenancy, were considered as well.

KuppingerCole created various leadership ratings, including “Product Leadership,” “Innovation Leadership,” and “Market Leadership,” to combine for the “Overall Leadership” rating. With this view, KuppingerCole gives an overall impression of each vendor’s offering in the particular market segment.

Product Leadership is based on analysis of product and services features and capabilities. This view focuses on the functional strength and completeness of each product.

Innovation Leadership focuses on a customer-oriented approach that ensures the product or service has compatibility with earlier versions, as well as supports new features that deliver emerging customer requirements.

Market Leadership is based on market criteria, such as number of customers, the partner ecosystem, the global reach and the nature of responses to factors affecting the market outlook. This view focuses on global reach, sales and service support, and successful execution of marketing strategy.

How IBM Ranks

IBM Security Access Manager (ISAM) is ranked as a leader in the Product, Marketing and Technology Leadership categories. This rating comes from IBM ISAM having one of the largest customer bases of all vendors in the market segment, a strong partner ecosystem, mature access management and strong adaptive authentication. ISAM is among the leading products in the access management and federation market and meets organizations’ growing lists of IT security requirements with broad feature support.