Vaso di coccio tra vasi di ferro

Blow the trumpets and blow the horns: we’re extremely happy that Engiweb Security has been announced as one of Gartner’s “Cool Vendors” for 2010, in the Application Security category. This is all thanks to the IDEAS platform that, even if could be best positioned as part of the market segment of “Access Governance Platform”, among other things provides additional support for Entitlement Management.

Will this acknowledgment create business opportunities for us in the international market? Will being a Gartner-certified “Cool Vendor” attract potential customers like bees to honey?

How to tell? This market is so strange!

Perhaps I’m a bit too disenchanted, but as a matter of fact, we still have to face a market where more than 60% of the customers do not perform serious “vendor selection” when they need to decide how to implement an identity management project.

As stated in the KPMG/Everett “2009 European Identity and Access Management Survey”, that can be downloaded here:

“When organizations are selecting their required IAM solution, a large amount acquire the solution of their preferred supplier and only 18% perform a vendor selection in order to select a ‘best of breed’ solution”

It is easy to guess who these “very very large” preferred vendors are…. however this may result in a “hidden” failure for the customer: licenses acquired and at once abandoned with no project that was implemented at all! (Hard to believe, but not everybody realizes that the implementation of a project is the biggest cost for an IM initiative).

I’m definitely pessimistic these days…

Anyway we at Engiweb Security have no intention of resting on our laurels… and we have some really cool things planned for the next product releases: Risk metrics/management and XACML support.
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Vaso di coccio tra vasi di ferro
This typical Italian expression was probably coined by Alessandro Manzoni who, in the first chapter of his masterpiece “Promessi Sposi” (The Betrothed), writes:

Il nostro Abbondio, non nobile,non ricco, coraggioso ancor meno s’era accorto, prima quasi di toccare gli anni della discrezione, d’essere in quella società, come un vaso di terra cotta, costretto a viaggiare in compagnia di molti vasi di ferro.
(Translation: Our Abbondio, not noble, not rich, not courageous, was therefore accustomed from his very infancy to look upon himself as a vessel of fragile earthenware, obliged to journey in company with many vessels of iron.)

The metaphor is clear: the vessel of fragile earthenware (Vaso di coccio) surrounded by many iron vessels (vasi di ferro), during a journey along a dirt road can easily be broken at the first little impact. Nowadays this expression describes a tricky situation where a person finds himself as a minority among hardened opponents.