Wednesday July 13, 2005

OpenSSO Announcement I'm finding the identity management industry pretty fascinating to watch... and a lot of fun to participate in. One major vendor announced the 5 axioms of identity. Those axioms lead to the 6 consequences of identity. Another big player has for some time talked about the 7 laws of identity. Lots of numbers. Lots of words and slides to explain the theories. I thought about putting together yet another slide on the "11 principles of identity" (have to outdo the competition... and 10 is too obvious). But here at Sun we have a bias for action. And what we've been talking about internally is the need to change the conversation away from "plumbing" and more about innovation and solutions themselves.

So today Sun is changing the identity market landscape by offering a very valuable identity service aimed primarily at the developer community -- the people who have to actually develop, test and deploy new services. We're open sourcing one of the IT industry’s top revenue-producing technologies: web single sign-on. That’s right! we're making another key component of our Sun Java Enterprise System, Sun's web single sign-on (OpenSSO) technology, freely and openly available.

We're moving the conversation forward to things like federation and identity services. We’re looking at how identity becomes inherent in the infrastructure services we’re building. We’re ready to quit talking about web single sign-on and which one is the right product, what standard is the right standard. It’s time to take these issues off the table. It’s not about web SSO, it’s about giving developers easy and open access to the fundamental underlying technology they need to quickly and securely build new services. They need to know that these base identity services are always there, consistently, pervasively and re-usable. That's how we'll get identity built into every application or service.

Today I presented to the identity management industry’s leading innovators and architects at Burton Group’s Catalyst event in San Diego. I discussed how identity management accelerates the Participation Age ITconversations and specifically, how Sun is fueling the acceleration of this new era.

The new world of participation requires our customers to address both opportunities and security threats at the same time. They’re being asked to drive new applications and services that will generate new lines of revenue—open their doors online to more and more participants each day. At the same time, they are still trying to address the latest compliance demands while fending off identity theft attacks. The key thing to note about participation is that businesses can no longer choose between opportunity and security—we have reached the age of no compromise. You can’t let growth take a backseat to security & privacy…at the same time, you have to find a way to limit your exposure and risk as you open yourself up to more access, more participation. That's the challenge Sun is focusing on.

And the good news is, with identity management driving business models to accommodate both revenue and growth, you don’t have to make that choice.

Web single sign-on is the most basic capability to opening up access securely and now it’s going to be widely and freely available to become “built-in” to applications being developed around the world. OpenSSO will provide open source code that will help members of the Java developer community build critical security capabilities such as authentication and web single sign-on into every application they build and deploy.

And we're not just throwing this code over the wall. We're building a community. See OpenSSO First code distribution will be available in Q4 of this calendar year.

It is generally believed that open source technologies are for commodity software products. However, this announcement proves that theory wrong. I argue that open source technologies can also be for software that needs to be commoditized in order for progress to be made. For years people have looked to Sun to innovate, to do things a little differently than the rest of our industry - kind of like a Crazy Ivan "let's zig when everyone expects us to zag" maneuver.. Watch this space for more zigs, zags.


Posted by johnnyl ( Jul 13 2005, 03:50:04 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]