She's ba-a-ck. The woman a called a "Texas whirlwind", the ebullient, peripatetic, indefatigable Sara Gates is back in the saddle.

The former “Vice President of Identity” for Sun abruptly gave it all up 18 months ago to unpack her bags, kick off her boots and sniff the roses. But we all knew it wouldn’t last. You can’t make a garden breeze out of a cyclone. So it was no surprise to me when a note plopped into my inbox a few weeks ago to let me know she’s rejoined the identity battles. We managed to get a few minutes on the phone so she could talk about this new phase in her life.

First, she assured me, she wasn’t leaving Texas. Austin affects some people that way. I, for example, had no trouble leaving Austin for the San Francisco Bay Area, but Sara won’t do that even though her new organization is just a couple of miles from my office. She’s the new VP of Marketing at Agiliance, an up-and-coming force in the Governance, Risk Management, Compliance and Entitlement (GRCE) space.

At the recent Catalyst Conference, Burton Group Vice President and Research Director Bob Blakley (also an Austin resident) called GRC “a four letter word.” He didn’t mean that it’s now GRCE, but that – in his opinion – Governance, Risk Management and Compliance had little in common: GRC is not one concept, but rather three separate ones and that Governance, Risk management, and Compliance should all be treated separately.

It’s a fair point, one that can be argued, but there is also commonality within those concepts and Agiliance, for one, wants you to think of them as “interdependent disciplines.” That interdependence is based on low-level auditing and monitoring which, in turn, can become high-level metrics. Applications that can gather all of the data in real-time are crucial, but just as important are services that can interpret that data both historically and on-the-fly. That’s what Agiliance offers.

Sara’s got her work cut out for her, then. Taking on Bob Blakley and the whole Burton Group team is a challenge. And, at the same time, she’s going up against her old Sun (and Waveset) colleagues at Sailpoint in this hottest of the hot areas in identity management. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride!

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.