Posted 3:31 PM

Oracle to buy BridgeStream?

Dan Primack, over at PEHUB, threw out a rumor the other day that Oracle was about to acquire BridgeStream, the role definition and management company. I've followed the privately held San Francisco startup for the past couple of years, and even just last summer believed that acquisition wasn't in the cards just yet:

"With some preaching a top-down approach of creating roles based on business rules and practices while others advocate a bottoms up approach emphasizing audits and data mining of what people actually do, there's no definitive "best practices" for role creation. While it seems obvious that, eventually, a synthesis of these methods will emerge as the standard way to create and manage roles, there's still enough diversity in the marketplace that the big identity management vendors aren't willing to bet on the final outcome. Instead, they'll partner with many different role creation companies. That means that folks like Bridgestream, Eurekify, Trusted Network Technologies, BHOLD, Blackbird, Engiweb, Prodigen, SecurIT, and Vaau will maintain their independence for now with only the remote possibility that should any of them founder with customers their investors might seek to sell out at fire sale prices."

But I think I can give a fair amount of credence to Primack's rumor for two reasons:

1) Oracle is still on an acquisition roll, and getting deeper into roles makes sense for them;
2) Role management needs to be intimately connected to the IdM suite of products, something that simply parternering with an independent role management company doesn't give a major vendor.

Look for this to become official over the next week or so...

Labels: acquisition, bridgestream, oracle, RBAC, roles