Friday, January 29, 2010

Agreon wins Oracle’s 2009 Zenith Award for Identity Management Partner of the Year


Congratulations to Agreon for winning the Zenith Award for Identity Management Partner of the Year. This is a well deserving award to a partner who has been committed to the use of Oracle’s technology and successful in delivering implementations of Oracle’s Identity Management technology to our customers.

If I recall back to 2006, when the Oracle Identity Management practice was initially established in Australia/New Zealand, things were very different back then. We were seen by others already in the game as being late-to-market. We had no committed partners in this space and even though we had the best-of-breed technology in our portfolio – we had no proven deployments locally in any vertical. Many had doubted our technology, commitment, focus and ability to execute.

Agreon was already an established and respected Identity Management Systems Integrator back then. They saw the strategic nature of a close partnership with Oracle and stepped up to be a valuable Oracle partner, which was followed by many successful deployments of Oracle’s Identity Management technology.

Three-and-a-half years on, and we are now getting comments from external parties that we have the most focused team in Identity Management, the strongest momentum in the market and the best suite of products and technology in this space. We have now proven strength in all the major verticals including Financial Services, Government, Manufacturing and Retail. How things have turned around in such a short time. What made the difference? Three things in my mind…

Firstly, I think being “late-to-market” played to our advantage.

For the early adopters who already have an existing solution on Identity Management, a lot of them were looking at ways to revamp their Identity Management strategy on how they can take it to the next level. We were able to help them by offering our advice based on our technologies and experience on what other successful customer deployments have been able to achieve. For example, in addition to Identity Management for internal users (e.g. HR-driven provisioning for employees to reduce cost and improve productivity), we are also seeing a huge interest in "Extranet Identity Management”, especially for business partners, retail and corporate customers for the best return on investment in the technology.

For customers who are now starting to look at Identity Management, we were able to leverage our knowledge and experience, together with partners like Agreon, to better guide our customers so they could avoid making the same mistakes as some of the early adopters in the past. For example, Identity Management deployment best practices in terms of how to phase a project deployment, prioritisation, integration approach, communication, etc.

Secondly - Our Focus. I think the focus that Oracle has in this space has significantly contributed to the growth and momentum that we have seen in Oracle Identity Management in this market.

Last, but not least – Our Partners. Having skilled and experienced partners like Agreon to help deliver the technology to our customers, means that we have a much higher ability to execute on IDM deployments and most importantly, making our customers happy and successful.

I think we are only beginning to see the adoption and acceleration of Identity Management, which is becoming an increasingly topical and important topic for organisations especially those who are subject to strict compliance or regulatory requirements, or are looking at strategic computing approaches such as adopting Cloud Computing services – where Identity, Access and Security Management is critical.

And now the future of Oracle Identity Management has just got a lot sunnier :)

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