* Sun releases two identity management initiatives
I recently spent a delightful couple of hours with the always engaging Sara Gates, Sun’s vice president of identity, while she told me about the company’s new identity management initiatives: Sun Java System Federation Manager and Sun Java System Identity Manager Service Provider Edition.
I recently spent a delightful couple of hours with the always engaging Sara Gates, Sun’s vice president of identity, while she told me about the company’s new identity management initiatives: Sun Java System Federation Manager and Sun Java System Identity Manager Service Provider Edition.
Since I’m not aware that Sun has any other “system” besides the “Sun Java System,” we’ll simply call these Sun Federation Manager (SFM) and Sun Identity Manager for Service Providers (SIM4SP). Whoever names products at Sun definitely needs an editor.
SIM4SP, to my thinking, returns Sun to its identity roots. It uses the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) to bring account and application provisioning to the service provider market. This was actually the direction that Netscape – with its Netscape Directory Server – was going at the time the company was split between AOL and Sun (that’s where AOL’s Instant Messenger came from). Sun took the identity management pieces and (successfully, I might argue) went after the enterprise business.
Truth to tell, the service providers really weren’t ready for provisioning services five years ago. But now they are and the standards and protocols are ready. Sun can hopefully leverage the speed and efficiency with which it acquired the Netscape pieces and couple that with the provisioning expertise it got along with its Waveset acquisition to provide a very good, outward facing, Web-services provisioning product. Get all the details from https://www.sun.com/software/products/identity_mgr_spe/index.xml especially if you’re in the business of providing services to others.
The Sun Federation Manager (SFM) is the latest entry in what will shortly become a very crowded field as federation really takes off both within the enterprise as well as among business partners. SFM specifically targets the extranet, though, as it aims to not only tie together business-to-business relationships but also the one-to-many relationship of business-to-client/customer. SFM is really a number of existing products wrapped up with new specifications and protocols.
In his Weblog, Pat Patterson, a technical architect at Sun, writes (https://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/superpat/20050621#sun_java_system_federation_manager):
“So what, exactly, is Federation Manager? Well, it’s the SAML and Liberty technology that has been in Access Manager for the past two or three years, built into a new product specifically designed for the service provider. Doesn’t Access Manager already support service providers? Well, yes, it does, and it will continue to do so. FM trades-off some of Access Manager’s more advanced features in favour of ease of use when federation-enabling service providers.”
And that’s a better description than I could come up with.
Oops! I’m just about out of time and haven’t gotten to my conversation with BMC’s Somesh Singh. Come back next time and I’ll tell all.
