This year's Catalyst Conference, the tenth annual event put on the Burton Group folks, was notable for a number of reasons but none for product announcements of the make-you-jump-up-and-yell-"wow!" variety.

The most noticeable thing was what I'll call the "maturing" of the identity management space. Just two short years ago provisioning service competitors (such as, say, Business Layers and Access360) were hurling imprecations across the room at each other. This year found competitors tossing packets of data among themselves as almost a dozen provisioning vendors along with PeopleSoft demonstrated their interoperability using the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML - which I pronounce "SPAM-el" even though it makes participants in the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee wince).

It was a needed, if underwhelming, demonstration of the new standard. After all, those same vendors had been pulling the PeopleSoft data for years; this just meant a switch to PeopleSoft pushing the data. The potential, though, is exciting as different enterprises using different applications and different provisioning services will soon be able to exchange provisioning data across the public network. The implications for supply chain management are enormous (adding self-service provisioning is just one possibility) but all extranet functionality should be enhanced.

Other standards-based announcements included the WS-Federation specification and the Liberty Alliance Business Requirements documents, both of which we covered in last week's newsletters.

One brand new company was featured, Voltage Technology, which will be marketing a new concept in security called "Identity Based Encryption" (IBE). We'll take an in-depth look at that in a couple of weeks. For now, check out Voltage's Web site and some research into IBE by Stanford University (see links below).
 
Among the lasting impressions (some things I'll have nightmares about for years) are Burton analyst Fred Cohen, standing on the karaoke stage, desperately searching the song book for the words to "Alley Cat" (Fred, check at http://www.lyricsxp.com/lyrics/t/the_alley_cat_song_bobby_rydell.html). Other memories include the Waveset crew members wandering around with sharks on their heads and Business Layers' Sharon Tolpin with a phone growing out of her ear 24 hours a day. But what did people have to do to get a string of beads from the IBM Mardi Gras booth, and why did Burton senior analyst (and fellow Network World columnist) Jim Kobielus have so many?

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