Mark Dixon has just written a post about the critical characteristics an Identity Services layer must have to become part of Enterprise architecture. These characteristics are born from the idea that identity services will become to enterprise applications what dialtone was to the (extremely successful) telephone service – the very backbone on which it all
There has been a lot of discussion recently on the topic of an Identity Bus (see the recent newsletters by Dave Kearns from May 5, May 7, May 12 and May 14, and some blog posts by Kim Cameron and our own Clayton Donley). The use of the word “Bus” creates some confusion, since what
In response to my previous blog post about identity services, I received the following question from Billy: “isn’t this what OpenID aims to do? If not, how not?” OpenID can be a small (but key) part of the identity services story. The main problem that OpenID tries to solve is one that most people who
The ever thought-provoking Pamela Dingle has issued a challenge to Enterprise Application vendors. In it, she puts forth the idea that technology and market demand has reached the point where those in the business of building and selling enterprise applications should (must?) figure out how to externalize authentication. But she also points out what has
There has been an interesting discussion going on regarding the fate of metadirectory technology. Dave Kearns talked about it in his newsletter recently (see: Is the metadirectory dead). In it, he quoted Jackson Shaw, who brought it up as context to HP’s recent retrenchment: “Let’s be honest. The meta-directory is dead. Approaches that look like
Recently, a few things have reminded me that we still don’t have a clear understanding of how the concept of user-centric identity will fit into the enterprise environments we are so familiar with. But the question keeps coming up, in different forms. Pamela Dingle recently commented on her blog about Patrick Harding’s observations on this
Here is what I learnt at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, where (as I mentioned in my previous post) I was participating in a panel on “Identity: The Ultimate Solution to SOA Security“. The SOA community is not very clear about what we mean when we talk about Identity, let alone Identity Services. The panel
Like I mentioned last week, this is an interesting time for Identity Services. In that post I talked about some of the reasons why this is relevant to what’s going on at Oracle. But this is also relevant to the industry at large. There are lots of small projects going on that at some point
This is an interesting time for me at Oracle. One of the reasons why I haven’t been active on this blog for a while is that I have been immersed in discussions about fusion architecture and how identity services fits into it. Those following my blog know that one of the initiatives I have been
It took me a while to recover from last weeks Digital ID World conference. And it wasn’t just because of the mad scramble I went through at the last minute to update all my slides for my talk. That was just the side effect of spending too much time in some really interesting sessions and