IBM Tivoli Access Manager [EOL] vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

"OAuth 2 is now the de facto standard for API protection and scoped authorized delegation. IBM TAM now supports OAuth 2 and can act as fully compliant OAuth 2 authorization server."

"The Verify feature: A push method which customers are going for."

"The integration effort with the end application is quite straightforward and easy."

"Single Sign-On functionality is valuable because the core purpose of the product is to allow universal (or bespoke) SSO for application suites."

"SAML 2.0."

"The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows."

"The authentication and single sign-on features of Symantec Siteminder are valuable."

"Right now, federation that comes out-of-the-box with single sign-on is the most valuable feature that we have, and also scalability."

"As our identity model continues to mature, probably the Federation is most valueable."

"The solution has features that allow you to easily distinguish between protected and unprotected resources."

"I liked the debugging part. There are only two files (trace file and log file) that you need to look into while performing debugging, and the logs give you the exact info on where and what needs to be fixed."

"If you look at our organization, and really all financial institutions, we have a lot of legacy apps. So it really helps to get Single Sign-On."

"IWA is an out-of-the-box feature. The SAML-based federation is standard for all tools. However, CA Single Sign-On has made the federation configuration way too simple and handy to set up and use."

"The self-service portal needs improvement."

"The profiling element is incredibly robust, but also equally as complex, it requires an off-site course to be able to understand the context or the plethora of options available."

"An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for the newer appliance versions for hosting the virtual appliances on AWS will help."

"Looking at their roadmap, they have a broad grasp of the security features which the industry needs."

"Multi-factor authentication with social integration needs to improve."

"The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live."

"Symantec SiteMinder is not easy to set up and maintain at an infrastructure level."

"Symantec Siteminder needs to have adaptive authentication and multi-factor authentication as integrated features."

"All the problems that we reported actually have never been resolved. We could not capture enough information for CA to be able to debug the problem."

"The initial setup of Symantec SiteMinder was a bit tricky. I would rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten, where ten indicates an easy setup."

"They need to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting."

"I would like to see a move towards the newer technologies, which is what we are doing right now. I think that's in the roadmap that's coming, in the 12.8 and 14 releases, but we would like to have it sooner than later."

"Siteminder needs to improve its user experience."

"The IBM prices are, as ever, extortionate, even with a business partnership, and high levels of discounts."

"The solution's pricing is competitive."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."

"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."

"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."

"The licensing is fair for this solution."

"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."

"Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using."