I had lunch with some friends from one of my old clients today.  I found out they were in the midst of a Sun Identity Management implementation project.  It was interesting to hear them vent about what they didn’t like about the product.  Now I don’t pretend to know anything about Sun Identity Management and I'm sure it does a great job overall, but here’s what I remember from the conversation:

• Sun does integrate with PeopleSoft HRMS to drive your e-Provisioning.  But it doesn’t take the obvious approach of subscribing to the PERSON_BASIC/WORKFORCE messages.  Instead Sun ships a component interface, and connects directly to the application server to query it.  And it only calls one CI, so if you need to join to multiple tables performance can be a real problem.   Apparently they had to customize Sun’s Identity Management so that it could pull data from three CI’s in order to keep performance acceptable.  This whole CI approach seems entirely against Sun’s philosophy of Service Oriented Architecture.  It also irritates this client who considers any modification of what’s delivered distasteful.

• The current version of Sun’s Identity Management doesn’t handle future dated rows correctly.  They had to create custom views to work around this issue.

• I thought it was interesting that the open source version is actually a release behind the version that clients pay for.  Makes me think the open source version (in addition to being free) might actually be more stable.  Quite the opposite of what I’m used to in the Linux world where open source Fedora is on the cutting edge where Red Hat Enterprise is actually a bit behind.

• They were frustrated that the implementation partner didn’t address their HRMS integration concerns early in the project, waiting until test when their concerns became identified as bugs (and possibly causing the go-live date to slip).  The implementation partner didn’t have as deep of an understanding of PeopleSoft HRMS they would have liked.

I hope you won’t use these second-hand comments to eliminate Sun as an identity management provider.  But it might give you some good questions to ask your Sun representative during the pre-sales discussions.

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