Do you remember Calendra? The vendor which was acquired by BMC many years ago? At least many existing and remaining customers require Calendra. And some of them really miss the company.
What made Calendra popular was their tool which allowed to quickly building applications to deal with information held in directories. That approach was different to provisioning, different to meta directories, and it was not just hard coding everything. Being a specialized IDE for database environment, it allows customer to quickly build directory-based applications for example to manage employee data or to implement specific approaches for delegated administrators.
Even while some few vendors try to fill the gap, there appears still to be sort of such a gap. But there is more than a silver stream at the horizon. The German company ITConcepts, a BMC partner (amongst others), has acquired the Calendra technology and is re-launching it. The product will be named Cognitum. The first version, available now, is more or less a rebranded version of the existing Calendra product. ITConcepts plans to quickly release an updated version with support for newer versions of Java stacks and some other maintenance, before moving forward with functional enhancements.
The good news for existing Calendra customers today is: Someone is working actively on that product again and provides support. And ITConcepts has a defined roadmap which looks realistic and doesn’t promise too much. However, given that ITConcepts has been a system integrator only until now, it will be interesting to observe how they execute in the software business. In any case, it is worth for Calendra customers to have a look at this offer. And chances are good that the gap in the overall IAM landscape which has been sort of left when Calendra was acquired by BMC will be filled again.