Openomics: innovation drives value

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is an XML-based standard, developed by the OASIS consortium, for exchanging user, resource and service provisioning information. SPML came in response to the need of unifying and automating the management of user accounts and rights inside a corporation. Indeed, with the multiplication of IT systems --logistics, accounting, customer management, human resources, you name it-- inside the companies we work for, the old (manual) ways of dealing with users --Dear Admin, please create account for new employee... Dear Admin, please give me access right for the folder/document... who doesn't remember writing one of these emails?-- could not keep up, responsible for too much incorrect data, leading to information leaks and productivity loss.

Today in its version 2.0 --version 1.0 had limited number of operations, limited scheme for user information and simpler using/integrating--, SPML has enabled the software industry to develop interoperable solutions of identity management, for the various IT systems themself to communicate and propagate changes in user information and rights. Examples of commercial solutions that are SPML-compliant include Sun Identity Manager and Oracle Identity Manager. We believe that it is essential that Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) applications today support advanced identity management operations beyond single sign-on --on that topic, check out this OpenSSO integration work.

Based in Moscow, 1C is a leading Russian software vendor, with 1M+ customers for their ERM software suite 1C:Enterprise and 18.7% market share in the Russia ERM market --making it the top #2 vendor in 2008 per a recent IDC study. 1C is particularly known as the maker of the most popular enterprise accounting system 1C:Accounting sold in the CIS region; about every company in Russia runs a copy of that software, I have been told. With such a large installed base, 1C has evolved to become the center of a large ecosystem and network of 5000+ partner integrators, resellers and software vendors. Some of which being Sun Microsystems partners as well…

"Thanks to Sun technology, we are continuing to bring innovative identity management solutions to market and driving growth."
Hervé Prot, CEO, Symeos

Specialized in Web services security, Symeos provides online identity management, federated authentication services and single sign-on technologies for customers across multiple industries, including banking and finance. With the support of Sun, Symeos has developed a new scalable identity management product called EGO to support the more than 10 million expected users.

Read the whole story at http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/symeos.xml  to learn how the combinaison of Sun systems, storage and software reduced the Symeos development cost by 60%, delivered a 99.999% infrastructure availability and improved Web application server performance by 92%. Symeos is a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program.

The proliferation of passwords in today’s corporate environment poses a significant threat to enterprise security, user productivity, and operational efficiency --a password-related issue is commonly said to the #1 reason for IT support calls, thus cost. As a result, companies seek to implement Single Sign-On (SSO) and identity management solutions, typically starting with vanilla company-wide applications like HR or collaboration tools.

Atlassian is a software company specializing in issue tracking and collaboration software. Their most popular products are JIRA, an issue tracking and project management system, and Confluence, an enterprise wiki. They also produce Crowd, an SSO application with out-of-the-box support for a limited set of applications --inc. Atlassian apps, Google Apps, Apache. Beyond that list, Atlassian users can build custom application connectors, using a proprietary built-in integration API though, not (yet) an open protocol like SAML. SAML is an XML-based open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization information between an identity provider and an application; the primary use case for SAML is to do SSO for web apps. SAML is produced by the OASIS Security Services Technical Committee. SAML is today supported in the open-source OpenSSO and commercial OpenSSO Enterprise identity management software from Sun.

Last summer, Alexey Abashev here at Sun's ISV Engineering developped a JIRA extension to integrate with OpenSSO so JIRA could speak SAML…