This was the staggering insight I learned @ TEC2012 from a fellow attendee on the IAM stream.  He confided that of all the new IdM business his (European) company wrote, which was split between FIM and another mainstream IdM platform, about 50% were selecting the other technology over FIM essentially because FIM was not “event driven”.  That is to say, the FIM solution model is to process changes in connected systems on a schedule, and not selectively in response to the change event itself!

This is outrageous because FIM, and ILM/MIIS before it, has been able to operate in this manner since UNIFY invented and patented UNIFYNow back in 2005!!!

Now known as Event Broker for FIM, this mature web application and windows service complements FIM like the proverbial “peaches and cream”,  It is now well into its 3rd major release, and is readily available for download to ANY FIM customer, or potential FIM customer.

I strongly believe that FIM SHOULD ALWAYS be configured to operate in this manner, if not ALL management agent operations, then definitely the majority of them.  It SHOULD be baked into FIM now … it’s not like this is a new idea or anything :).

So in the mean time PLEASE … when someone tries to tell you that you can’t run FIM in near real-time, or that FIM can’t be change-driven, direct them to this blog post, and let them know that FIM should never be excluded from the IAM selection process purely on this missing OOTB feature.