* Plus other news from Cryptolex and Oracle
My notes have been, once again, piling up so in this issue I’ll offer some “short takes” on recent occurrences and announcements.
Mobio, from Cryptolex is a new handheld authentication device that combines cryptography with portable biometrics, which the makers say provides a high-security identity system for voice verification, information sharing and network and physical access control. The technology could be dubbed “one-time fingerprints” and is an interesting concept. You should check out the offering on the Web site, read the papers and make your own decision, though.
Even more intriguing is an offering from Vancouver start-up Plantiga Technologies, which has developed a converged (physical plus logical) access method based on the biometrics of how you walk. Plantiga describes it as “gait enabled biometric technology,” or, more colloquially “footware.” See its technology page for a fuller explanation of this innovative concept. Who says there’s nothing new under the sun?
At last week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, the big identity-related announcement was important not for what was said, but more for what was revealed. Oracle touted the fact that it has finally better integrated its identity management product, Oracle Identity Manager, with its major application offerings, including PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM and Oracle E-Business Suite, so that they work together right out of the box. To me, the news isn’t that the improved integration is available now, but that it was not the case all along?
Gartner finally got around to announcing its Identity Access and Management Summit to be held in Las Vegas at the end of November. It’s just too bad that Gartner’s Research VP for Information Security and Privacy Ray Wagner had to belittle all past and current identity management work as “an undocumented morass that doesn’t work well and is not very auditable.”
According to Gartner: “The inaugural Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit is designed to help organizations address the growing exposure that IAM inefficiencies and lapses create.” I don’t know about you, but I find that the Catalyst Conference, augmented by Digital ID World, covers that area pretty well. I won’t be going to the Gartner conference.
One reason why I won’t be attending is that I’ll be in Sydney, Australia for the fifth annual Identity Management Forum put on by the Marcus Evans group. At the conference, we’ll be exploring “The identity crisis: From ‘enterprise centric’ to ‘user centric’ identity.” This will be my second trip to this conference (see “Have identity, will travel” for my first visit) and I hope to see many of my Australian readers at that time. Perhaps a late-night pint will fuel an even better discussion of “IAM inefficiencies and lapses” than Gartner’s Las Vegas extravaganza!
