* Upcoming SSO Summit presentation should be entertaining and educational
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reviewing some of what occurred at this year’s Catalyst conference, but there’s been so much to cover that I haven’t even begun to mention the conversations I had with established identity vendors (IBM, Sun, Novell, ActivIdentity, CA, Passlogix and more). There were a lot of announcements from these folk, most of which got covered in the print and online versions of Network World (my colleague, John Fontana, was also on the conference), but there are a few things I want to mention. First, though, let’s talk about next week.
Next week is the first (and perhaps, first annual) SSO Summit, in Keystone – just outside Denver. This is a targeted conference if ever there was one! Sessions will look at Enterprise SSO, Web SSO, even Federated SSO from the perspective of users, vendors and analysts. If you’re going to be there, be sure to stay until the very end as the last presentation of the event is a panel I’m moderating featuring three SSO customers/implementers each of whom chose a different vendor to partner with. In a no-holds-barred session we’ll explore the real ins and outs of SSO – what the roadblocks are, where the shortcuts might be found and why an otherwise sane person would choose to follow such a path. It should be entertaining as well as educational.
The SSO Summit is being promoted by Andre Durand, best known as the CEO of Ping Identity, which brings me back to the recent announcements at Catalyst as Ping was in the forefront, showing off “Ping Enable,” a family of methodologies, training, support and implementation services for secure Internet Single Sign-On (SSO) deployments. There were other new offerings, also.
Sun unveiled Sun Identity Manager 8.0, the latest incarnation of one of the more venerable identity management suites. This one includes all the role management bits that Sun gained from the Vaau acquisition.
IBM, not to be outshone, talked up its new release of Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, touting its ability to “…improve the end-user experience by moving to user-centric, federated SSO identity management that puts customers, partners and suppliers in control of asserting trust, determining where sign-on is occurring and which user attributes to share.” (really, marketing people talk like that!)
Hoping to garner early headlines, CA announced its new lineup a couple of weeks before the show, but reinforced the message during Catalyst. The new release was CA Security Compliance Manager, but the talk was about the upcoming CA Federation Manager, just going into beta. More on that as the release approaches.
There were other announcements, but we’re running out of room. Still, you’ll want to come back next issue where I detail a disturbing turn in the usually friendly identity vendor community. Stay tuned! (Compare Identity Management products)
