Another acquisition in the IAM and GRC has been announced that weekend. CA decided to buy Eurekify, a role management specialist with specific strengths in role mining, based in Israel. That adds to the recent acquisitions in that field, like Sun with Vaau or Oracle with Bridgestream. The CA/Eurekify deal is somewhat special because Eurekify has been more focused on pure role management than Vaau or Bridgestream. Thus, there won't be much overlap to CAs current portfolio.
The acquisition proves that CA is willing to invest in the IAM and GRC markets. There has been some time after the acquistion of Netegrity where we hadn't heard that much from CA - but with the R12 release of their Identity Manager, with focus on integration of own and acquired technologies, and now the acquisition of Eurekify, CA is definitely back in the game.
From a market perspective, the acquisition is pretty interesting. First of all, the opportunities for other players in the market to become acquired are less than before. On the other hand there are still some few big players which might to invest in role management and GRC specialists.
On the other hand, there are some new options for companies which are strong in role mining - like the swiss IPG AG or the italian Engiweb. Eurekify had many partnerships with Identity Management vendors. I don't expect other vendors to stay with Eurekify now that it is CA. Thus, some vendors will have to choose new partners in the not that long list of Role Mining and Role Management specialists (or, in the case of Engiweb, vendors that support Role Mining/Management amongst other functionalities).