The Decline of SiteMinder

1
 The Decline of Site Minder

• Its a safe choice, because Site Minder is
  currently the clear leader in terms of market
  share. But is Site Minder really all that great?
•  
• If you were an enterprise in the early 2000's,
  you were smart to deploy Site Minder. In the late
  90's, the Integrity teams pioneering work on
  Site Minder offered an epic improvement on
  home-grown SSO authentication wam software
  approaches. However, by 2003, the product was not
  too far from the product used today.
•  

2
In a past life, I was a buy side equity analyst
for a Wall Street firm. I followed a number of
mergers involving Computer Associates. CA
Management made their model clear to investors
buy mature products where customers are locked in
and no (or very little) innovation is required.
Many of these deals contribute revenue long after
their expected expiration date. From that
perspective, the Integrity acquisition was
brilliant strategy (for CA)   However, if
youre a customer of CA Site minder, think back
to 2003 There were no iPhones and Android would
have to wait another five years to show up on the
market. There were no cloud servers. Web Services
meant SOAP. And the idea that Linux would replace
Solaris in the enterprise seemed wildly
over-optimistic. Youd think that an important
enterprise security system would need an equally
dramatic upgrade. Even when Site Minder was owned
by Integrity, enhancements were slow to arrive.
If there is a new Site Minder feature you want,
or a bug to be fixed, your only recourse is to
wait for a patch. Expect to wait a long time.
Maybe this is good stability is good,
right? But as everyone knows, its hard to stand
still in the tech market. Although commercial
companies can get to market more quickly, these
days its inevitable that open source software
will follow. Usually it is better than the
proprietary software. This is especially true for
software that implements open standards, and
integrates with open source products like the
Apache HTTPD server. As Site Minder stood
relatively still for the last decade, open source
software has risen to the occasion.
3
At this point, its Site Minder that needs to do
the catching up, as the model for authorization
is no longer centralized its federated. Its not
just one Policy Server for a domain that
controls security for a website but websites
need to check with many authorization servers.
Here is a hypothetical example a website for the
Army might need to check policies for the Army,
the Dept of Defense, and other autonomous
organizations.   I predict Site Minders market
share has peaked. Of course, organizations dont
want to overpay to be locked into proprietary
software once there are any other options. The
market for access management has gotten more
competitive. Not only are there other enterprise
suites (some of which are mentioned in the
Forrester report linked above), there are also
SaaS identity services and open source
alternatives.   More and more organizations are
adopting central idp shibboleth authentication
and authorization systems. With greater demand,
prices have fallen dramatically. Lower prices
have brought the technology within grasp of
exponentially more organizations, thus increasing
the total size of the market. Soon enough, many
of Site Minders customers will look at the
current market price for the technology, and
realize they are paying far too much. It will be
hard for Site Minder to adjust without destroying
their current business model.   Article
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