Should CIO’s Invest in Identity as a Service?

The answer to that question is, “It depends.”More specifically, it depends on how you want to pay for your software and where you want to run it.

Ten years ago, when you bought software you got it on what I refer to as a “LALA” or “licensing agreement.” There were a bunch of different kinds - MLA, VLA, ELA, CLA, etc. - and you had a big stack of those and your purchasing people managed them.

Then, and I have to give them credit for being an innovator here, PeopleSoft started charging for their software based on an algorithm involving the number of employees you had and how profitable you were that year, because they positioned themselves as a “productivity” software company.

After that, you began to see lease-based pricing, subscription pricing, and all kinds of different ways to monetize the zeros and ones that had been lined up into a workload stack. And all that evolved into the “software as a service” model.

Software as a service, in the mind of the buyer, is nothing more than a different way to pay for an application. They used to pay for it on a LALA, now they’re going to pay for it on a monthly basis, plus they’ve gotten out of having to pay for the hardware and the care and feeding of it. Still, “as a service” is just another way to buy.

The other big thing that’s changed over the last ten years is where you run your stuff. I used to run it on Server #4 in the data center down the hall, for example. That’s not really a thing of the past; it’s a thing of the now. You still see it.

Then people started taking servers and putting them in a rack and saying, “We’ll just virtualize it all.” So now my Exchange stuff, or whatever, is somewhere in this rack. The next step after that was putting it in somebody else’s rack and letting them host it. Today, people can forgo hosting and just push stuff up into EC2.

So I have decisions. How do I want to pay for it? There are companies that love cap ex because they’re capital intense and they hate to have ongoing expenses and there are others who go the other way. Those preferences are going to determine how they buy but, that is also going to change based on things that are happening to them or where they are in the budget cycle during the course of the year.

The other component is where I choose to run it. If I’m a data center intensive company, I might just say, “I’ve got plenty of room I’m going to run it here.” If I’m not, if I’m something like a hospital, I might say, “I don’t really want to have that; I’m not in the IT business; I’m going to put it elsewhere.” Then, I’ve got choices for on-prem, off-prem, hosted, managed, not managed, all the way up to cloud.

Getting back to identity as a service, it’s just like any other application. If you need it, then you got to figure out how you’re going to buy and where you are going to run it.

What we're doing at Novell is combining our software solutions with partner ecosystems to provide a lot more choice. If you want to follow an op ex model, and don’t want to buy the software and train the FTEs and set this stuff up, great. We’ll set it up with identity as a service; we’ll host it; we’ll stick it in the cloud.

There are all sorts of business models being built that way.  Our recent collaboration with Verizon Business is a good example, as is our relationship with ACS.  With choice comes agility, and with agility, responsiveness to changing business demands.

Then there are other companies that say, “Roles are fundamental to my company and I’m not letting identity management outside of my four walls. I’m going to run it here.” These folks may be comfortable with access management being elsewhere, but the fundamental ‘who’s who in the zoo’ discussion they want to control and own because it’s too closely tied to compliance and regulation.

It’s business choice. It’s not a forced march of “This is what’s best for you,” and “There is a better way.” The better way is giving you more choice.

Which leaves you with two main challenges. On the one hand, how are you going to manage the choices you’ve made as CIO so that your internal customers are happy? On the other hand, are your partners and vendors flexible enough to support you through these various choices without trying to convince you that this or that solution is the one and only best choice?

So, like I said, “It depends.”

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