Getting the discussion going on Identity Services

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 could coalesce into a unified vision for Identity Services. However, this bottom-up development has to meet a top-down design at some point for this to play out properly. Otherwise all these projects could end up fulfilling their goals without making our overall identity experience better.

The timing of starting a concentrated effort at defining this top-down design is an ongoing debate happening in various spheres I am involved in, both inside and outside Oracle. Getting going on large scale architecture efforts are always hard, especially when it’s impact will be felt way down the line. But we have seen that happen in the area of SOA, so I am hopeful we will figure out a way to make it happen. Some of us have been trying to work out the right forum under which to set up a working group on the topic. But the important thing to do is to get a discussion going on the topic among stakeholders, something I have been trying to do through this blog.

Tomorrow, I will be participating in a panel on “Identity: The Ultimate Solution to SOA Security” at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum being held at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York. If you happen to be attending the conference, please plan on attending the discussion, which I hope we will be able to make interesting. And I will be more than happy if you come up to chat about this (or anything else) after the panel is over.