This year's innovators have a contribution and a strategy for access control and each places the emphasis on a different aspect or technique.

There are some very strongly held opinions on how to execute access control.

This Swedish company will, I predict, set the benchmark here in the United States for how access to applications should be controlled. AppGate has helped shape the direction of network infrastructure security in Europe for some years, and now this innovator is bringing its unique thoughts to the States.

What sets these guys apart from the multifactor herd? In a word, vision. From the start, TriCipher has had the vision of evolving into a full identity management provider. That is a pretty heady ambition for a developer of multifactor authentication tools. So how does this innovator plan to make the trip from providing a piece of the puzzle to offering the whole thing, already assembled, framed and hung on the wall?

Start with the recognition that identity management is just too hard to do, cre­ate a solution for that problem and then morph it into a successful service and you have the recipe for a real innovator.

Here is another vendor that we see a lot of in our labs. Passlogix knows who it is and concentrates on doing what it does as well as it can be done. And what they do is credential management.

Bradford Networks is no stranger to these pages. An innovator from last year, Bradford has been reviewed a num­ber of times over the years, always doing well. This year we asked them how well their crystal ball last year worked as 2008 unfolded.

This year our biggest product category was access control. This seems right because as the enterprise morphs into a ubiquitous environment - with few if any borders - there needs to be a way to control who can access it and who cannot. With such challenges as cloud computing and SaaS, that is a bigger job than it may appear on the surface. In fact, it is a bigger job than last year.