Today, Quest announced that they will acquire the German Völcker Informatik AG with its ActiveEntry product, a leading-edge identity provisioning solutions with some integrated Access Governance capabilities. From my perspective, that is a very interesting acquisition, which brings Quest into a leading position in the overall IAM market. Until now, Quest has been a provider of several point solutions around IAM issues. They had some provisioning capabilities in their ActiveRoles Server before - but it hasn't been the technical leading-edge product but more an add-on for some provisioning for Active Directory and a little beyond.
Right now, they are one of the vendors in the market which have solutions in most of the areas of IAM. They have one of the (from a technology perspective) definitely leading-edge products in the markets for identity provisioning. And they have a lot of complementary solutions. Beyond that, ActiveEntry fits very well into the Quest portfolio by supporting Active Directory environments at a high level but going well beyond that. Thus, it is sort of the perfect fit.
Quest right now is a full competitor of the big and established ones in the market like Oracle, IBM, Novell, and the others. It is in an interesting competitive position regarding Microsoft, Omada and related vendors. And, if you look at the number of people working around IAM, Quest is also from that perspective one of the vendors with the biggest potential in the market. With other words: This acquisition will heavily affect the IAM market and Quest will be one of the vendors to really take into account now.
There are several reports on Quest and Völcker from KuppingerCole available at www.kuppingercole.com/reports. Have a look at them (or ask us for advice...).