* Majority of federated projects still in planning stages, survey says
Last January (see editorial links below) we brought you the results of a survey by PingID about people’s “federated identity” projects. PingID created and supports SourceID, the open source multi-protocol project for enabling identity federation, so it does have an interest in keeping tabs on federation projects. To that end, it’s now doing quarterly surveys to gauge the “state of federation” in the marketplace.
The results of PingID’s second-quarter 2004 survey have just been released (somehow the first-quarter results snuck past me), so I thought it would be interesting to compare these numbers to those I reported six months ago.
In the January survey of 157 respondents, we noted that 73% of federation projects were still in the planning stages and 59% were six months away from implementation. Six months later in the survey of 97 respondents, the numbers show 70% reported they were in the planning stages, and 63% were at least six months away from implementation! The numbers from the Q1 2004 survey were 70% in the planning stage and 59% at least six months away from production. What does that tell us?
It could be that there’s a large turnover in the population surveyed. It’s not a scientific study by any means. But I think it’s more likely that the numbers reflect the difficulty of implementing large-scale identity projects. It may mean that IT departments, which generally speaking lead the planning and implementation of identity projects, have run into the issues we’ve talked about before – the technology is extremely easy, but the social aspects of the project are very difficult and cause unforeseen roadblocks.
Another reason could be that enterprises are waiting for the protocol convergence that many feel is needed between the Liberty Alliance and the Microsoft-IBM backed WS-Federation, Many feel that the convergence will be forthcoming “real soon now.” Even Liberty Alliance President Michael Barrett feels that competing standards are one of the major reasons why identity federation projects are moving slowly (see editorial link below).
If you’d like to share your experiences of a federated identity project, or if you’d like to hear what others have been up to in this area, there will be a Federated Identity Management “birds of a feather” session at next month’s Catalyst conference in San Diego. If you’re going to the event, register now at https://www.burtongroup.com/catalyst/catna04/bofidm.asp for this limited seating session. No vendors are allowed in the session; only “end user enterprise organizations.” I’m not even sure that Burton Group Research Director Dan Blum (who’s moderating the session and is a friend and fellow columnist at Network World) will even let me be a fly-on-the-wall. But the session could be helpful to you.
In the meantime, I’ll suggest to Eric Norlin (PingID’s indefatigable senior vice president of corporate marketing) to consider asking in future surveys what are the sticking points and roadblocks to implementing federated ID projects. And, of course, we’ll let you all know the results.
