Lumigent CEO jabs at Oracle Audit Vault - Eye on Oracle
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» VIEW ALL POSTS May 16 2007   9:42AM GMT

Lumigent CEO jabs at Oracle Audit Vault



Posted by: Mark Brunelli
Oracle database administration, Oracle applications

A news story we posted last week about Oracle’s new Audit Vault software generated a strongly worded response from Cliff Pollan, the CEO of Lumigent, one of Oracle’s competitors in the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market.  Thankfully, the response was directed at Oracle, rather than yours truly, as I’m very fragile.

Here’s what Pollan had to say:

“The release of Oracle Audit Vault comes as no surprise to the database auditing and compliance marketplace as Oracle has been discussing this project for almost a year. But this offering is quite limited in both features and scope. Audit Vault is a 1.0 release in a mature market and can only be used for a subset of Oracle databases. It does not address the number one concern of enterprise customers – the need to audit in a multi-vendor environment. Strategic applications span a variety of database systems including not only Oracle but also IBM, Microsoft and Sybase. Sophisticated customers have moved well past these basics and are now implementing solutions that leverage the audit repositories to build a sustainable compliance process. Most feel a high degree of urgency and I am not sure they have time to wait until Oracle can provide the depth of functionality that is needed now.”

Now, back on my middle school playground, those were fighting words. But what really jumped out at me about this quote had to do with the fact that we reported that Oracle plans to widen Audit Vault’s support for non-Oracle systems sometime within the next year. So I brought this to Pollan’s attention and he had this to add:

“For over five years, Lumigent has been hearing from our installed base of more than 500 clients of the critical need for multi-vendor support in their auditing, compliance and security. Users appreciate an independent vendor who has made the flexibility of multi-vendor support a priority. Oracle’s Audit Vault does not provide this today, and Oracle has not been clear on exactly how they plan to support non-Oracle databases on their own in the future.”

Does Pollan have a point? Let us know.

 – Mark Brunelli, News Editor 

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Waseem  |   May 17 2007   1:41AM GMT

From my view point:-

1)Oracle is famous for its s/w lock-on for almost all its organic products like MS.

2)Audit vault works best along with Database Vault,an Oracle DB feature.

3)Promise of multi-vendor support is just that,a promise.Unless Larry makes me eat my workds.

4)Oracle has the backing of Financial institutions who would wait for Oracle to launch a mature product.

5)Oracle would win this war hands down if it launches an equally feature rich product.

*****Me an Oracle Fan*****


 

Sanjeet Sodhi  |   May 17 2007   10:14PM GMT

Interesting standpoint that he takes. His position is based solely on the fact that Oracle Audit Vault does not have support for a multi-vendor environment, which is a respectable stance to take. Given the announcement of the forthcoming solution, however, I think one can safely disregard his argument, which is largely repetitive and more of a marketing campaign than a rational analysis of the product in question.

Nothing quite like the whims of a business with his knickers in a twist…


 

Craig S. Mullins  |   May 21 2007   9:10AM GMT

This is an interesting tirade, but I think Pollan from Lumigent makes a decent point. Yes, yes, he is a competitor and Oracle is a software giant that you’d prefer not to compete with. On the other hand, Lumigent has focus whereas Oracle is spread across quite a variety of software offerings.

The bottom line is exactly as Pollan states - heterogeneous support. Will Oracle offer that in an auditing solution? OK, Oracle has support for other DBMS products in some of their products (Designer, OEM), but these are products that do not require low level interfaces to either the log layout or the control blocks of the product. If Oracle hoeps to interface to SQL Server or DB2 at that level they cannot count on help from Microsoft and IBM. If they do not plan on interfacing at that level, then there are likely to be performance issues with an auditing solution IMHO.


 
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