As seen on Wikipedia:

Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in “enterprise” (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.

Opinions are mixed on whether there actually is something concrete behind the enthusiasm, or just a case of collective 2.0-itis. But the easiest way to think about it (and understand how it will benefit businesses) is to think of it as the next stage in the evolution of collaboration tools that can boost productivity, responsiveness and knowledge sharing in enterprise environments. If you have a Facebook account, you know just how much your communication with your friends and family has changed (and hopefully improved, those photographs you never wanted anyone to see notwithstanding) because of it. Think of that same transformation, just in an Enterprise context.

Oracle has thrown their hat in the Enterprise 2.0 ring by providing a sneak peek at Oracle Sales Prospector during their keynote at this weeks Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. It’s a CRM add-on that leverages collective intelligence from the network of salespeople to identify qualified leads and provide better targeted recommendations. Built on open, standards-based technology including Oracle Fusion Middleware, this next-generation sales productivity application leverages an enterprise social networking foundation and is delivered via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model leveraging Oracle Grid Computing. Click here to read Ian Yip’s post about a conversation he had with Oracle President Charles Phillips about Enterprise 2.0.

With a whole slew of products looking to hit enterprises soon, the implications for Identity Management are obvious. We are about to enter a stage where applications are going to leverage more and more information about a person’s identity and their social network. In order for this to be accurate, manageable and sustainable, these applications will HAVE to sit on a backbone of identity services that manage and control this information.

Accuracy of data will be critical, which will be a death-knell for replication/copying based strategies. Age old issues of “who owns the data” will become both more prevalent and yet less important, as more and more applications seek to share data. Issues of privacy are bound to explode, leading to a greater need for user-centric and policy-driven controls in such a rich information environment. Without a proper identity services stack to sit on, these new Enterprise 2.0 Applications are going to find their foundations very shaky indeed. This is one of the fundamental things we have been trying to solve as part of our involvement in Project Fusion.

Now to go “friend” my expense administrator. Wonder what benefits I can reap from that

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Fusion Identity Management, Identity in Social Networking, Oracle Identity Management, Social Networking

As usual, OpenWorld was chaotic, massive and entirely overwhelming. Between the claustrophobia induced by the crowds crossing Howard Street or cramming into keynotes, the rush of standing in front of folks to talk about identity management in fusion architecture, the late, late evenings with customers and co-workers, and almost being trampled by a couple of OpenWorld revelers dancing a wild jig at Lefty O’Douls, it’s been a crazy couple of days. Oh, and the conference has been interesting too.

OpenWorld always has the production values of a rock concert, and one of the interesting things that the organizing team did this year was incorporate a form of user-generated content into the opening for the Keynotes. Before the keynotes would start, a poll or questions would be posted on the giant screens in the keynote hall, and the audience members would be encouraged to send in their responses by text message, with the results being shown on the screen in real-time. While the poll questions elicited some good feedback from the audience, it was interesting to see some of the responses people sent in to questions like “The next killer app would be…“, “What features would you most like to see in Oracle products?” and “What was the first Oracle product you encountered?“. Messages ranged from the humorous to the thought-provoking, with a couple of digs at Larry.

Audience Polls before Keynotes

THE KEYNOTES
All the keynote speakers used their platform to really showcase their products and make some major announcements. The big announcement from Oracle was first made during Charles Phillips keynote on Monday, and then repeated throughout the week – the introduction of Oracle VM, Oracle’s server virtualization software technology (check it out). During his keynote, Charles also talked about Oracle’s growth by acquisition benefiting customers by moving the inter-application integration challenge off the customer’s shoulders and onto Oracle’s plate, delivered through Oracle Application Integration Architecture.

Thomas Kurian used his keynote to explain how Fusion Middleware was going to change how business is delivered by applications on the back of 5 middleware “pillars” – SOA, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Enterprise 2.0 technologies (which includes collaboration and communication tools, content management and rich user experience), Security and Identity Management, and Grid Computing.

Larry Ellison used his CEO Keynote to update everyone on Unbreakable Linux (which he launched at last year’s OpenWorld), expand on the launch of Oracle VM, and talk about the first Fusion Application that will be rolling off the production line – Sales Force Automation (SFA). A demo provided a first look at the 3 slick applications that make up SFA: Sales
Prospector, Sales References, and Sales Tools. Interestingly enough (for IdM), SFA incorporates social concepts into its functionality.

Oracle partners that gave keynote addresses this year were AMD, HP, Intel, Dell and Sun. Among the more interesting, Sun announced the launch of their open-source project in Server Virtualization, OpenxVM. AMD, Intel, HP and Dell all announced products focused on enabling greener Data Centers, where power utilization and efficiency are greatly improved.

Charles Phillips giving his Keynote

You can check out webcasts of all the keynotes here.

THE SESSIONS
As so often happens at these events, customer meetings eclipse my ability to attend sessions with any regularity. OpenWorld presents a good opportunity to listen to people from other parts of the company (that I would be hard pressed to find time with) introduce their products and talk about their plans for the same. The rate at which Oracle acquires companies and technologies sometimes means that this is the only way to figure out technologies we have in-house that can help in our development activities. So it was good to be able to go to sessions and learn about Coherence, Hyperion and a few other technologies.

The audience was definitely geared towards the database and applications side of the house. In terms of the topics that I touch on in this blog, interest was high in understanding the value that Oracle’s IAM suite brings to current deployments of Oracle Applications like E-Business Suite, and in understanding where Fusion Applications was going. While the attendance at IdM sessions was not as high, the quality of people in attendance was extremely high, with discussions exploring topics in quite a bit of depth.

IDENTITY SERVICES AT OPENWORLD
My session on “Identity Management in Fusion Architecture” was extremely well received and drew some quality feedback. The folks who showed up were really interested in seeing how the concept of identity will be woven into the fabric of Fusion Applications moving forward. And a number of them gave me some really good real-world information on challenges that they are facing today. A lot of them came to the session not exactly sure what identity even meant in the fusion concept, and left (hopefully) a little clearer on the topic.

I had hoped for a lot more people to come so that I could get some more input, but I’ll be more than happy if folks participate in a discussion via this blog as well. Check out the presentation I gave in my session by downloading it from here.

MESSAGES
Virtualization is hot, and information is more important than ever. Getting applications to work with each other in a seamless manner is the key to business innovation. And the next hot thing in applications is the incorporation of social concepts into their functionality, combining Business Intelligence with Human Intelligence in a way that will make it easier to solve the real challenges enterprise users face every day.

THOUGHTS
As I mentioned above, I had a number of interesting side discussions with customers and prospects at OpenWorld this year. I was really encouraged to finally connect with a customer that had some deep and well thought through needs for deploying enterprise identity services. Most of the customers I know who are thinking of identity services are thinking about it as an enterprise architecture project (because they know it is the right thing to do) without any concrete consumers lined up. This particular customer actually has projects planned that could really use identity services. It led to a very interesting conversation that I found quite stimulating. I will definitely be covering some of my thoughts that came out of this meeting in the coming weeks.

Also, I found a number of people interested in understanding fusion architecture as a way of figuring out how they should go about standardizing their application development efforts. The big thing I saw was that there are a few enterprises out there that want to put an identity services layer in place, and are debating whether to build it themselves or wait till someone in the identity community comes out with something. While I am pretty sure that frameworks like Higgins can help some of these folks, there were a number that talked about Higgins being too low level in the abstraction it offers.

The fact that concepts emerging from the social networking arena are actually being built into the way the next generation of applications will work presents an interesting challenge for identity management. Not only are identity services going to have to scale to a level that supports these kind of interactions in applications, they will also need to have the right controls in place to protect privacy while not preventing the kind of collaboration that social concepts will foster.

Well, looks like we are about ready to land. I will probably post this sometime tonight, with my next post probably focusing on the Gartner summit. But add some comments if you have some thoughts on OpenWorld, Fusion, IdM and the crazy world of Oracle. Oh, and if you were at my session and were one of the people taking photographs of me while I spoke, drop me an email with some of those pictures, will ya? I’d love to see what was drawing so many flashes

Tags: Application-Centric IdM, Fusion Identity Management, Identity Services, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle OpenWorld

Any question about the viability of identity services is tightly tied to the viability of SOA in how enterprise applications are built, something which is being strongly questioned in the industry (the sheer number of articles, blog posts and analyst reports with the words “SOA”, “myth” and “reality” in the title is an indicator of that). The big issue in any SOA debate tends to boil down to performance and availability concerns.

Also muddying the waters in the fusion discussion is the blurry boundary between identity data and HR data. HR is universally acknowledged as an authoritative source of identity information in an enterprise context. However, it becomes problematic when we have to divide up the data that HR masters into identity data that applications come to the identity service to access and HR data that applications (which by definition would then be tied to HR) go directly to HR to access.

One of the reasons why Fusion Identity Management is more than just the typical identity services discussion is that the nature of Fusion Applications is much more complex than the typical application that we consider when we talk about identity services. In Fusion architecture, we are talking about managing identities in thousands of applications across a few application pillars, with some pretty complex interplay among them. Externalizing identities and roles becomes a lot more complex (and at the same time a lot more important) when security is being integrated into every tier of such a complex mega-application architecture, be it UI, business logic, middleware or database. And when I heard about the need to support disconnected mobile applications with no connection to that identity cloud in the sky, I found myself reaching for the Tylenol.

All this means that those of us working on identity services have some pretty tough questions to answer.

Tags: Fusion Identity Management, Identity Services, Oracle Identity Management

Discussions on Identity at Collaborate
Not suprisingly for a user group conference, the overwhelming majority of questions I fielded at Collaborate pertained to how IdM fits into the Fusion vision for applications. People from various strata of the applications universe were trying to understand this at a very basic level. But what complicated the discussions was the fact that people are still not clear on what we mean when we talk about “Identity”. In fact, I even got someone asking me if identity management was similar to UDDI! While I certainly wasn’t expecting people at the conference to have a deep understanding of identity management, that one threw me for a loop.

The Challenge
Recently, Johannes Ernst asked members of the Internet Identity Workshop how they would explain to an identity neophyte and non-technologist “why identity is important”. The spirited discussion led to the rather generic, but all-important, conclusion that identity provides context that enables you and your consumers to do business the way you want to. Doing business the way you want encompasses issues of trust, transparency, convenience, security, privacy and community. As context changes based on the business domain you are talking about, so does the definition of identity.

Our Focus: Enterprise Identity
The focus of our group has been on that specific version of digital identity that we refer to as Enterprise Identity. Enterprise Identity covers those aspects of your digital representation within the enterprise environment that the enterprise needs to manage or delegate management of. So in that context, Enterprise Identity covers personally identifiable information (PII), roles, relationships, accounts and related access, physical assets and privileges/entitlements. The diagram below illustrates this basic definition (click on it for a larger view).

Identity in Fusion
One of the things that constantly comes up in any discussion of Fusion is a debate around where identity data ends and application data begins. PII and some aspects of roles and relationships today reside most commonly within the domain of HR applications. On the other hand, application environments like retail applications consider this application data. Entitlement management has traditionally been within the application domain. And we know how much of a mess any discussion of roles ends up being.

In a SOA-based enterprise architecture, this kind of ambiguity is a recipe for chaos. And as identity has become an important component of application business logic, businesses are being forced to empower end-users via self-service and delegated administration capabilities to make their architectures scalable and practical. This requires the view of “one identity” for a user in Fusion, so that users have one place to go in order to manage their identity in the enterprise. That is the central idea behind the campaign for “identity as a service” and its inclusion into Fusion architecture via a middleware service called Fusion Identity Management. This was what I introduced in my session at Collaborate, and if you missed it, well, there’s always OpenWorld

In the meantime, it would be interesting to hear from people in the applications community what they feel identity management in Fusion means to them. So start sending me those comments and emails.

Tags: Application-Centric IdM, Enterprise Identity, Fusion Identity Management, Identity Services, Oracle Identity Management