* Catalyst 2003 news from Microsoft, Sun, Novell, Neoteris
Today we’ll continue with our look at this year’s Catalyst Conference, including the many announcements from the identity-related vendors who were in attendance.
As previously mentioned, OASIS had a lot going on. There was the first interoperability demonstration of the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) as well as the introduction of WS-Federation (a possible future OASIS standard) and the first set of business guidelines from the Liberty Alliance (whose 1.x specification is now maintained by OASIS).
Microsoft had a much bigger presence this year than in any previous Catalyst event. Along with the announcement of the WS-Federation spec, which was co-authored with IBM, there was also a lot of hoopla surrounding the recent announcement of Identity Integration Server (and lots of giggles about its abbreviation). Jackson Shaw seemed rightly proud of the service he’s shepherded since even before Microsoft acquired Zoomit and its Via metadirectory, the progenitor of Microsoft’s new product.
Novell announced that Nsure Audit is now shipping. This was the long anticipated auditing package for all eDirectory platforms and is tied heavily to the reporting structures needed for compliance with U.S. government regulations (such as the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – all U.S. government regulations). It also supports an open API so that other applications can take advantage of its logging potential.
Sun talked about its previously-announced 64-bit directory architecture as well as its new Identity Synchronization for Windows, an add-on service to the Sun ONE identity platform. Evidently Sun missed the club meeting where the other identity vendors agreed that July would be the best time to announce new products and services! (That’s a joke. Please, no hate mail!)
Appliance vendor Neoteris launched its newest device, a plug-in server that provides secure, reliable, no-client-needed cost-effective online meeting services.
Waveset (with Sun and PeopleSoft), Business Layers (with Microsoft) and Thor Technologies (with RSA and Oracle) each announced new partnerships and alignments as electronic provisioning moves beyond the standalone service to become a mission-critical, enterprise-wide business necessity.
Critical Path announced a new password management service for the enterprise that appears far too little and far too late to revive this former identity and communications giant.
Oblix was quick to jump on the new mantra of “Web services” and is realigning its product line to be more of an outward-facing, extranet-enhanced, supply-chain-supporting set of services. I’m still not entirely sure of what CEO Gordon Eubanks says when he speaks, but he has gathered capable people about him and the company does seem to be acquiring focus.
I’m still not convinced of the true value of metadirectories, since I feel that a well designed virtual directory is the proper interface for applications to talk to. Radiant Logic, which invented the concept of the virtual directory, still has to my mind the best implementation with a virtual frontend and a reliable database backend. Now if only Michel Prompt would update his slides.
Speaking of virtual and metadirectories, the most surreal moment of the conference came when I was speaking to OctetString founder Clayton Donley. OctetString sells (and Donley created) a very good Virtual Directory Engine (VDE) yet he spent 20 minutes trying to convince me that metadirectories – in addition to virtual directories – might be needed by many organizations. I did promise that I’d take another look at the technology.
There was more and I’m sure I’ll hear from those I didn’t mention in this issue but there’s also more to say about each of the announcements I’ve just mentioned. Over the course of the next few weeks and months we will get around to all of them.
