This blog would not be complete without a recap of our recently concluded CA World.  And even though several weeks and the Thanksgiving holiday have passed since we wound down CA World, several impressions are still fresh in my mind.  I spent most of time at CA World in customer meetings or on the show floor and found the dialogue and interest in our current Content-Aware IAM solutions as well as our newly announced CA CloudMinder suite of Cloud IAM services to be significant.

So in keeping with our internal slogan, "What happens in Vegas at CA World is Shared with the World," here are my thoughts on key customer feedback I received at CA World.

• Do more with what we have - This was a very consistent theme among customers I talked to and probably a reflection of the ongoing budgetary pressures facing IT organizations. Many of my CA World conversations focused on how our customers could either: Further optimize their existing CA IAM deployments OR extend the existing IAM deployments to cover new use cases, constituencies or business initiatives. These comments reflected today's budgetary realitites but also demonstrated that organizations still see IAM as a critical enabler and foundation for helping organizations grow. This was a very refreshing viewpoint and indicates that predictions about certain IAM technologies becoming obsolete may be misguided.
• Scale matters - Scalability is one of those "abilities" (like manageability, serviceability, reliability) that is so widely used that it is often ignored. But the release of our 100 million test project for CA Identity Manager and the CA World session that discussed the results indicated that scalability does matter when it comes to IAM, especially as organizations look more and more to the web for interfacing with customers and suddenly have to contend with increasingly larger numbers of users. More on this in tomorrow's blog.
• Cloud is real - The announcement of our IdentityMinder as-a-Service and FedMinder as-a-Service cloud solutions (as well as other CA cloud-related announcements) generated a lot of enthusiasm among all CA World attendees. And unlike some previous technology trends that I have been involved with, customers were not immediately dismissive of cloud, but rather were very interested in seeing how the cloud could help their business now or in the immediate future. This was just another positive affirmation on the importance of cloud, our strategy and the CA CloudMinder portfolio.

All in all, it was a very productive show and great to interact with so many CA customers and partners and gain perspective on where the IAM industry is headed.  And now that CA World has been put to bed, it is time to start prepping for the next conference - the RSA Conference that starts the end of February 2012!