On July 1, 2013, RSA acquired Aveksa for an undisclosed sum. The Aveksa access governance solution, which includes access request management and approval, attestation, role mining and management, user account provisioning, identity administration and auditing will augment RSA's existing product lines for access control (RSA Access Manager, RSA Authentication Manager, RSA Federated Identity Manager, RSA Adaptive Federation, RSA Adaptive Directory, etc.). Short term, Aveksa will operate under its old management and will keep its OEM relationship with OneLogin for single sign-on into SaaS applications. Forrester expects that RSA will integrate its access management, VMware Horizon, and fraud management (SilverTail) product lines into a modern and full functionality IAM portfolio using risk and identity intelligence concepts — and which will initially probably suffer from the growing pains that Dell's Quest IAM acquisition and Oracle's stack suffered from immediately after their IAM acquisitions. Forrester expects that long term, RSA also will revitalize and consolidate its access management portfolio, solidify its presence in the cloud IAM space (IAM as a SaaS offering), and offer the stack as a fully hosted option, similar to CA's CloudMinder.

What it means: After years of consolidation and vendors bailing out of the space (HP, BMC, etc.), we will have one more vendor to choose from in the complete, full-functionality IAM suites market. This will create greater competition and more innovation — something we and our clients are particularly happy about.