* Seen and heard at Burton Group's Catalyst Conference
Last week I was at the Burton Group’s annual Catalyst Conference, which is always a pleasant experience. It can actually be fun to be in a room where people applaud – or hoot down – esoteric ideas such as identity management frameworks (The Higgins Project or Microsoft’s Identity Metasystem, for example). As always there was a lot to talk about, although there were surprisingly few really new things announced. Even the speakers seemed more subdued than usual.
Burton Group CEO Jamie Lewis did give a cogent view of the state of identity management, which was very reminiscent of the address he gave a year ago. It’s not that Lewis is slipping, but that the identity management industry appears to be taking a collective breath while the implementers in the enterprise catch up with the last few years’ worth of technology improvements. Even Burton Vice President and Research Director Mike Neuenschwander, in reviewing the identity management market landscape, was able to reuse a few slides from his review at the 2005 conference. There are a few new players, and a few have left the scene (mostly through acquisition) but there’s little actual change.
There did seem to be a bigger presence from the so-called “user-centric” identity community. Infocard’s Kim Cameron and Sxip’s Dick Hardt shared a panel with Sun and Liberty Alliance “XML grrl” Eve Maler. The “Identity Gang” got together for a face-to-face meeting and still mostly agreed that they’re going to disagree about most things, especially the terms we’ll use to talk about identity.
I also got to spend quality time with some of the best and brightest in the identity field, including some Oracle folks who ended up at the Redwood Shores company through its acquisition of Oblix, Thor and Octetstring, and execs from Novell, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Ping Identity, MaXware, Courion, ActivIdentity, Passlogix, Eurekify, Bridgestream, Radiant Logic, Quest, Encentuate and Apere. There were others, also, whose names escape me at the moment but I’ll cover a lot of what they had to say in the coming weeks. One thing they did seem to agree on – at least, those I asked – was the perception that the headlong rush into identity management caused by the rash of regulations that needed to be complied with has slowed on the vendor side. It’s just another indicator that the vendors are waiting while the enterprises catch up and finish their rollouts and installations.
There was one development, though, that could presage a new burst of activity in the identity management wars. It came from Sun and, surprisingly, there was no press release trumpeting the news. But we’ll get to that in the next issue.
You can read more about identity management rollouts at enterprises in this Network World report from the show.
