Pizza anyone? A humorous, but thought-provoking view of possible use and abuse of a national ID system, from Aaron Russo‘s Freedom to Fascism movie.

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National ID Card

New additions to the Whodentity list:

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Whodentity

I’m spending the week in Las Vegas with my colleagues from Sun’s Identity Management Architecture and Enablement Team, preparing for our new fiscal year. Las Vegas is an odd place for a guy who is the antithesis of a party animal. But we had a great time having dinner in the Mix Restaurant atop THEHotel at Mandalay Bay. The event was sponsored by Iditarod Systems, a leading implementor of Sun Identity Management solutions. Enjoy the view!

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At the recent Catalyst Conference, John Shewchuk of Microsoft said, essentially, “InfoCard is the concept. Windows CardSpace is a specific selector, using the InfoCard concept.”

During the Q&A period for the panel on which he sat, I asked John, “What is Microsoft’s motivation for committing so many resources to the InfoCard/CardSpace initiative?”

His response was predictable: Microsoft’s customers demand interoperability.

OK. I’ll take that as a given. It is customer demand that has driven the recent Sun Microsystems / Microsoft interoperability efforts. But I think the motivation is much deeper than that. The motivation is to establish preeminence in the battle for large-scale identity infrastructure. Microsoft isn’t going to make money from CardSpace on the desktop. It will be yet another feature of Windows. But if the big dogs (e.g. Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) adopt the Microsoft meta system for User-centric Identity, Microsoft will have a leg up on other competitors, including our own Sun Microsystems, for selling large-scale Identity infrastructure to identity providers and relying parties.

Make no mistake. User-centric Identity is not some altruistic quest for identity/privacy nirvana. It is an intense competition for who will build the infrastructure to make it happen.

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Dave Kearns headlined his recent newsletter, “Sun says it will not seek licenses for use of SAML patents”

“That means that whether or not Sun owns patents on methods used by SAML, it will refrain from asking anyone to license that intellectual property. Not that Sun will grant a royalty-free license, but that it simply will not require one … So what does it mean? It means that any lingering doubt that a vendor or customer could be liable for royalties somewhere down the road are substantially eliminated. Companies can implement SAML 2.0-based applications and services with less worry that future liability could kill a project or seriously drain a company’s finances.”

Eve Maler made the first public announcement of this matter at the Catalyst Conference. There was little comment from members of the panel on which she sat. I don’t think many people realized the positive ramifications of the statement.

I’m no lawyer, so I cannot comment on why this is necessary from a legal standpoint, but the announcement underlines the commitment Sun Microsystems had made to open standards and the growth of the Identity Management marketplace.

By the way, I took the photo of Dave when we met at the Catalyst Conference. One of his comments: “It’s nice to meet another blogger with grandchildren!”

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Dave Kearns

Rohan, I admire you for your gracious tolerance. When I lived in the UK during the early 1970’s, the term “Paki” was used in very derogatory ways. I don’t know the real intent of the Horton’s guy who addressed you as a Paki, but I hope he was inspired to better sensitivity through your coaching.

And I’m honored, Rohan, that you would contact me and ask permission to use the name of my blog, “Discovering Identity” in his post yesterday. As I said in our IM exchange last night, “As I chose the title “Discoverying Identity” for my blog, I felt it had a double meaning. One meaning was the professional one — progressively understanding the Identity Management market and technology. But the other meaning is precisely what you are planning to address in your blog — how do we find who we really are? What is our own personal idenity?”

You have obviously discovered yours. Thanks for your insight.

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Rohan Pinto

At the recent Catalyst Conference, two of the people I met over lunch were a VP of SunTrust Bank and a consultant from Cybertrust, an information security services firm. “SunTrust” sparks an old-school image of strong vaults and federal deposit insurance, of stern, trustworthy bankers and kind, but firm tellers, all elements of a aura of invincible security that would cause someone to trust the bank enough to deposit hard-earned money.

On the other hand, the name “Cybertrust” attempts to create the same compelling image of invincible security in the online world – with protective measures invisible to most eyes.

This interesting contrast between the virtual and the tangible highlights a striking similarity – that Trust is the focal point. Institutions seek to establish trusting relationships with their customers in order to enable meaningful commerce. This concept is at the heart of our business.

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At the recent Catalyst Conference, I caught a few shots of my Sun Microsystems colleagues as we enjoyed the Sun Microsystems and Liberty Alliance hospitality suites. My apologies to the Sun folks I didn’t photograph … and to those of you I caught in unflattering poses.

If you let your mouse pointer hover over each photo, you can see the name of each person. You can click through to Flickr, where you can see full-size photos. Enjoy!

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Today was the last day of the conference, with only half a day of formal sessions. The Identity track transformed more into an application development track. While quite interesting from a personal interest standpoint, it was less valuable for me than the previous two days of intensive discussion of Identity Management issues. Jamie Lewis graciously allowed me to take his photo for today’s entry.

Anne Thomas Manes (Burton) – Leveraging Services Infrastructure to Improve the User Experience

• Effective User Experience will result in increased efficiency and productivity, better customer satisfaction and better business results
• Improve user experience through integration, data aggregation, seamless access, interactivity
• Use contextual design principles – stay focused on the user’s task
• Allow users to work in their preferred context (e.g. Email client)
• Microsoft/SAP Duet will build access to business system within productivity applications
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA) make web application almost as interactive and responsive as desktop clients. Put bling on the screen – but not too much.
• RIA methods include AJAX (least sophisticated, most popular), Flash (widespread adoption), Java-based, XML-based, Windows Presentation Foundation (/Everywhere).

Diana Kelley (Burton) – Secure Collaboration: Learning not to Overshare

• We are a sharing species; we share much online.
• Communications and collaboration are cornerstones of today’s business.
• Collaboration and communications are “kindred spirits.”
• We must deal with security risks for email, VOIP, IM, RSS, Wikis, collab workspaces …
• Cool toys (e.g. wireless phones, PDA’s) have security risks – exposing email, voice …
• Follow standard security Mantras: integrity, accountability, use control, confidentiality, availability.

Udo Waibel (SAP Labs) – Leveraging SAP’s Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) to Create a New User Experience

• SAP has not known for designing good user interfaces. Duet is a radical new approach to UI.
• UI context switch takes away time and focus.
• Outlook is the user interface of choice for many people (love it and hate it).
• Objective: Provide business process context in your UI of choice.
• Integrate with Microsoft Office, using a meta-data – driven UI.
• Close integration with Outlook + business relevant information.
• Architected from scratch with Enterprise Services Architecture.
• Active Directory is used for authorizing access to the UI, but not within the system.

Richard Monson-Haefal (Burton) – RIA: Rich Internet Applications

• RIA – client server with the reach of the Internet, with the sophistication of the desktop
• RIA technologies are easily misused and abused with inappropriate applications, poor designs or poor implementations.
• Client options: Ajax (Asynchronous Java script and XML), Flash, Java applets plus several others.
• Server options: Java EE, Microsoft .net, LAMP, Ruby on Rails.
• Advantages include ease of use, near-desktop user experience, SOA/Portal synergy, network/server performance (depending on design), end user productivity and ease of development.
• Disadvantages include ease of abuse, complexity, constraints on reach and network/server performance (depending on design).
• Seamless integration of AJAX with HTML makes it a disruptive force in the RIA market because it AJAX can be easily added to existing HTML assets.
• Adobe Flash is the current RIA market leader. Excellent reach because of broad support in web browsers and devices. Excellent tooling.
• Java Applets are supported by a huge ecosystem, excellent reach and excellent tooling, but is losing mindshare to Ajax and Flash.
• Non pervasive solutions include Microsoft WPF/E, Mozilla XUL, W3C recommendations.
• Burton believes that Java will disappear as a viable RIA solution in 2007, possibly replaced by Microsoft WPF/E.

Joe Winchester (IBM) – The Battle for the Presentation Layer, or It’s not over till the fat client sings.

• One of the reasons for success of the web is that the UI is that applications are easily distributed.
• Old terms – dumb terminals, fat clients, thin clients (derogatory terms).
• Current terms – Rich clients, Rich Internet Applications (positive terms).
• Death of the desktop application occurred because of difficulty in deployment these applications.
• Dissing Java applets is “so last millenium.” JavaStar is worth looking at.
• Death of the browser application will occur because of delays in waiting for web pages, poor UI design and poor error handling.
• AJAX has a lot of hype, but won’t scale.
• Google Maps is cool, but Google Earth, a desktop application, is superior.
• The important argument is not about fat vs thin for dumb vs intelligence. It’s about rich content delivered in different ways.

Jim McDonald (Ingersoll Rand) – Identity Enabling a Dealer Portal: Lessons Learned from Ingersoll Rand’s Identity Management Deployment

• Many brands, many dealer portals, many applications, different logins for each site, technology silos, complex technology mesh.
• Objective: simplify dealer access to online applications and simplify architecture.
• Implemented Unified Identity Management using Oblix.
• Key ingredients: communicate executive support, group design session, developers cookbook, enroll teams as stakeholder.
• Didn’t replace applications, but integrated with core functionality of Oblix system.
• They reduced help-desk calls through user self-service.

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Oh, the irony of it all! A few years ago, I visited Siemens in Germany. The people with whom we met proudly told us that a recent study had determined that Siemens was fourth in the whole world in the number of countries where they had a corporate presence. That’s a lot of countries!

Who was ahead of them? In third place was Coca Cola; in second, the Catholic Church. Who was number one? It was Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the governing body for the ever popular sport we crass Americans call soccer.

So, with Germany hosting this year’s World Cup, and Siemens challenging FIFA for ubiquity in the world, what did Siemens choose as a theme for their Catalyst Conference hospitality suite? Yep, American Football! Aaarrggh!

But the little bear I received tonight was really pretty cute – football and all!

By the way, this will be my token World Cup post. My colleague Jonathan Gershater told me I should follow up my series of blogs about the Phoenix Suns with some commentary on the World Cup. I must admit that the little story about Siemens and FIFA is about all I know about international football. I trust that someone with more knowledge will carry the torch.

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