Atlassian is an Aussie company more famous for the Confluence Wiki and Jira bug tracking software than Crowd – their IdM product suite (if being generous) / stack of identity stuff (more on target).

Crowd includes an .NET SSO application framework (think raw web access management), some basic provisioning and OpenID integration. I heard about this great news last week and promptly forgot until I read the latest Slattery’s Watch email (company here, subscribe here)a few minutes ago. Since I’m lazy, here is their take verbatim (where’s the RT button??):

Atlassian has received a USD $60M investment from venture capital firm, Accel Partners for a minority equity position. Rich Wong, Partner at Accel Partners, will join Atlassian’s board. On the Atlassian blog, Mike Cannon-Brookes said that after being courted for years by many investors, Accel stood out because they understood Atlassian’s culture and values. Atlassian was co-founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar in Sydney, has been profitable since its inception, and until this round has received no outside financing. Mike and Scott will continue as co-CEOs of Atlassian. Atlassian has 225 employees based in Australia, North America and Europe. The funds from Accel will help expansion plans into Europe and Asia and to facilitate liquidity for employees.

And hopefully some more home grown idm.

A post from: Identity Management

A little askew of idm, but of industry relevance, Japanese telco NTT has made a $3.6 billion offer for global IT services firm Dimension Data. What’s the relevance you may ask? Well in 2007  Verizon made a similar move and bought Cybertrust for its security consulting, assessment and managed security services starting the transformation to a services company (ala IBM?). DiData also provides similar security services, though possibly not as many or as much (feel free to correct me if required guys). Disclosure: I work for the integrated Cybertrust at Verizon Business in Hong Kong.

What Dimension Data (aka DD or DiData) does have is a far more extensive IT systems integration capability than the old Cybertrust, which might make a more natural transition for a Telco. Its probably going to be easier for the NTT sales guys, used to selling pipes and telco kit, to understand how to sell IT kit / boxes/ networking thingies than perhaps managed security services and ‘x’ days of vulnerability assessment.

However, if NTT are thinking of doing another Telstra and buying an integrator (Kaz) to work on internal projects, this could go pear-shaped very quickly.

And linking it back to Idm, DD deploys Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager, Quest ActiveRoles, Imprivata SSO and others.

More coverage -> Ovum not so sure on the takeover

This will definitely be interesting!

A post from: Identity Management