Last year I lamented that there were few announcements of products, technology or anything else coming out of the Catalyst conference. Well, the vendors seem to have taken those words to heart because this year there were not only major announcements from lots of people, but multiple major announcements from some.
Oracle, for example, announced a new package of Managed Identity Services in cooperation with Wipro Technologies, one of the largest support service providers worldwide, providing comprehensive IT solutions and services, including systems integration, outsourcing, package implementation, software application development and maintenance services to large and small corporations. Couple this with Fischer’s announcement in May and you might see a trend towards identity management as a service developing.
Oracle also announced new partnerships with vendors including Arcot, Cyber-Ark, ForeScout, Imageware, Juniper, Pay By Touch, Quantum Secure and TriCipher, as part of its Extended Identity Management Ecosystem and Reference Architecture initiative – a tighter structure than simply a technology partnership.
NetPro announced new versions of two top products for Active Directory: NetPro ChangeAuditor 4.0 which now enables admins to track, alert, and identify changes with more than 160 new alerts for Member Servers, DNS, Registry, File Systems, and Exchange; and SecurityManager 4.0 which now provides six new built-in security policies for real-time compliance monitoring, auditing and security coverage with Active Directory configuration protection and more.
OSIS, the Open Source Identity System, demonstrated interoperability between OpenID and CardSpace with the participation of BMC, Eclipse Higgins Project, IBM, Microsoft, NetMesh, Novell, Nulli Secundus, OpenInfoCard, Oracle, Pamela Project, Ping Identity, Red Hat, SocialPhysics, Sun, VeriSign, and XMLDAP. Ping Identity also announced the launch of signon.com, a site which acts as an OpenID provider while also allowing the user to authenticate with a CardSpace card, either a managed card or a self-issued one.
Novell’s Bandit Project caused long-time NetWare/eDirectory fans to almost swoon when they announced DigitalME as an open source CardSpace equivalent technology. But this wasn’t the old DigitalME, only a recycling of the name. Still it is important in the iCard technology arena.
Ping Identity also announced a strategic relationship with Radiant Logic to integrate directory virtualization services with identity federation by linking PingFederate to the RadiantOne Virtual Directory Server. Maybe that can move federation along more quickly.
One final note, I often complain about vendor hospitality suites - small rooms into which vendors pack in a loud band and then attempt to shout a demo of a product at people who really can’t hear. This year Bridgestream tried something different – soft background music. Not surprisingly (to me) two thirds of the people in the room were clustered around the demo station taking it all in. I do hope other vendors take note!