There were a couple of recent announcements that should be brought to your attention, one to "close the circle" on something while the other leaves the circle open and ambiguous. First, the closure.

Earlier this year HP announced that, in essence, they were getting out of the identity business. Officially they said that they would continue to support existing customers, but there wasn’t much in the way of details of how that would be done. Now, HP and Novell have announced an agreement to facilitate migration of HP Identity Center customers to Novell’s identity and security management solutions. The companies will work on this jointly, HP and Novell will develop migration tools to help their respective services teams automate and ease the transition from HP Identity Center to Novell solutions. In addition, Novell will offer license credit for current HP Identity Center customers – for the first 12 months, Novell is offering full license credit for customers that begin migration to its identity and security management products.

This sounds like a win-win situation for both companies and the HP customers – a rare occurrence these days and something that should be commended.

The second announcement came from IBM, a new release of Tivoli Federated Identity Manager. This new Tivoli Federated Identity Manager provides new, extensive interoperability – providing the ability to work with other vendor’s Web access management software as well as the leading open source and user centric identity projects, such as OpenID, SAML 2.0 and Eclipse’s Higgins. Again, that’s good news. Interoperability appears to be the “new religion” in identity as protocol convergence slips beyond the horizon. At the recent Internet Identity Workshop, in fact, convergence (previously a hot topic) was rarely mentioned but interoperability featured prominently.

There was also an intriguing part to the IBM announcement which stated: “IBM Tivoli has been particularly busy over the past six months… the company also acquired Encentuate to strengthen its Web single sign-on technology…”

That’s it, no word about when Encentuate’s technology would be integrated, or what provisions there were for the current customers of Tivoli’s products to move from the now-in-use Passlogix technology to the new system. It may be too soon, of course, it may be that IBM hasn’t fully gelled it’s plans, but the customers might be getting a bit antsy to know what’s in store for them – and, just maybe, they might start looking elsewhere.

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