While I am a bit worried about how scatterbrained AdventNet seems to be - I do think that they have a chance to disrupt a very inefficient and parasitic softwar

While I am a bit worried about how scatterbrained AdventNet seems to be - I do think that they have a chance to disrupt a very inefficient and parasitic software eco-system that exists in Business Software. They only need to figure out the integration piece and the fact that they have played with some Microsoft Active Directory tools and embrace outside identity systems may help them get there. I have found that the biggest draw to "integrated" software is not having a new set of credentials to login into it. I am finding some success with technologies that can play nice with various directories. I am currently playing with Novell's EDirectory and its Identity Management solutions and it surprises me how few companies focus on what I see as one of the central problems in business IT: the seamless integration between the company's CRM, the team's contacts and the directories that power each business solution. There is a huge need for a business class 'identity-in-the-cloud' solution that speak to many internal systems using software hooks/drivers that are very transparent, have good auditing and can be controlled by the company/customer. I bet a large percentage of software projects at companies have overlapping user management sub-systems that could be better addressed by an identity-in-the-cloud system like the ones emerging from Microsoft, Google et al. And for those who say that your company has too many secrets to possibly use an outside solution for identity - get over it, it is not true. You have many people forwarding things to their Gmail accounts and many mobile devices around the country without even a pin code to secure them. Your sense of security is an illusion, embrace solutions that can provide complete audits of what happens with them, then you will know how insecure you really are and plan around the fact that total security is impossible. And your internal development team will never reach the self-auditing stage of the solution because as soon as it half works they are pulled to something else.