Examples of External Systems would include a badge system with no API, or a procurement request for a cell phone or laptop again using a manual process perhaps interacting with closed systems with no API. During onboarding manual processes, such as sending and receiving fax's or emails or even telephone calls would take place in order to complete the provisioning request. Whilst this works today there's often problems occuring from forgotten work, or badly worded instructions etc giving rise to problems in the order-delivery process (imagine a laptop coming mis-configuring and the resulting cost to get this problem resolved).
We've seen that once customers get their provisioning systems deployed, often by third parties, the cost of introducing new provisioning targets can be expensive and disruptive. Hence often the provisioning systems tend to stagnate as new targets are introducted. Using the External Resources from Sun Identity Manager allows customers to easily integrate a new provisioning target that may be offline, or maybe online, it just depends
