The Smoking Monkey: The Trials and Tribulations of Daniel P. Raskin, Sun Identity Marketing Extraordinaire

SL Enquirer, Palo Alto, California
Friday, September 5, 2008

Several weeks ago two men claimed to have discovered the existence of an IdentiCat in the woods of Sun Island in Second Life. The two men, Daniel Raskin and Jamie Nelson, promised physical evidence of the creature. According to Pat Patterson, head of a group called Searching for IdentiCat and a former farmer and haberdasher from England, "the video is proof that the IdentiCat lives! If you don't believe us then join us September 30 in the forests of Sun Island to hear the IdentiCat talk about the magic of OpenSSO Enterprise 8. Register early because we're expecting a very large crowd!"

Below is the first video ever captured of the magical IdentiCat in action . . .

Next week I attend Digital ID World, an identity funfest in Anaheim, CA. One of the great aspects of this event is the interaction of customers, vendors and analysts. That said, a strange thing occurred earlier in the week that really shocked me. A Sun colleague working on OpenSSO with me tried to register for a Monday workshop entitled "Enterprise Role Management Workshop: Leveraging Roles For Successful Identity Governance" and received an email back from Sailpoint stating . . .

Sir Pat Patterson has writen a nice blog summarizing and linking to some great articles on OpenSSO and application integration options. Check 'em out!

Pat Before Being Dubbed an Open Source Knight by the Queen

SL Enquirer, Palo Alto, California
Friday, August 15, 2008

Whenever someone reports sighting the hairy beast of yore (details always fuzzy) or capturing the hirsute humanoid on film (images always grainy), it scares up a dubious debate of international proportions. Friday was just the latest episode in the IdentiCat show, as unreal as it may be.

Two men who claim to have stumbled across an IdentiCat in the woods of Sun Island in Second Life indignantly stood by their story at a news conference in Palo Alto during which they offered a picture as evidence and acknowledged they wouldn't mind making a few bucks from the "find."

"Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words," predicted Jamie Nelson, Director of Access Management and Federation at Sun Microsystems.

Nelson and Daniel Raskin, a Product Line Manager at Sun, announced the discovery in early August to close friends and co-workers. Although they did not consider themselves devoted IdentiCat trackers before then, they have since started offering weekend search expeditions in Sun Island for L$499. The specimen they took a picture of, the men say, was one of several Cat-like creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods. IdentiCats, thought to be fokelore until today, are famous for their innovative thoughts on identity management and gifted abilities of identity prescience.

As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and IdentiCat fans that included one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit, Nelson and Raskin were joined Friday by Pat Patterson, head of a group called Searching for IdentiCat. Other IdentiCat hunters call Patterson a cheap huckster looking for media attention.

Nelson and Raskin plan to release a video of the IdentiCat in the next few weeks and have announced that they will be hosting a coming out party and presentation by the mysterious IdentiCat in October around access management, federation and secure web services. Stay tuned for more information.

Developers interested in learning access management and federation tend to be focused on solving a specific problem and have constrained time. They need to be provided tools that help them implement their solution quickly, while simultaneously educating them on how to use the product in complex environments.

To help ease this pain and provide community members pragmatic ways of introducing customers to OpenSSO, we are now providing self-paced labs that focus on teaching users how to do essential tasks such as deploying multiple instances, SSL-enabling them, installing a software load balancer and configuring session failover. The labs are 100% FREE and are a great primer for learning about OpenSSO on your own.

Check them out on the newly launched OpenSSO.org training page.

The OpenSSO Project is soliciting feedback on their Early Access Build -- OpenSSO Express Build 5. With the release of this build, community members now have the opportunity to participate in the Early Access (EA) program for Sun's next commercial offering. Review the Early Access documentation and hammer away at Express Build 5! Send your EA feedback to opensso.eafeedback@dev.java.net so we can make the product perfect. Thanks in advance!

Boooh ya! Marina Sum published a nice technical article on OpenSSO identity Services at the Sun Developer Network. Check it out here!

"Kuppinger Cole believes that in principle, open-sourced development has large advantages for customers. The hybrid approach of an innovative version with a short release cycle in parallel to a commercial release with a longer release cycle works very well when both are supported equally and enterprises can choose freely. The number of developers and the ability to contribute also gives enterprises peace of mind. Last but not least, several large enterprises have made very positive experience with a bottom-up approach to access management with OpenSSO. We therefore consider OpenSSO Express/Access Manager to be a safe product investment, when the features match the specific business needs."

--Felix Gaehtgens, Kuppinger Cole

You got to love quotes like the one above from Kuppinger Cole. Check out the full article here.

The word on open source is getting out and the excitement is building day by day. Since the OpenSSO Express announcement my phone has been ringing off the hook with questions and interest. As Fozzy Bear used to say, "Wocka, Wocka Wocka!" :-)

Following our exciting OpenSSO Express announcement last week, there is big news this week regarding Sun's OpenDS project, an open source, 100% java directory server that is suuuuuper simple to use. Sun announced the availability of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition (SE) 1.0, a fully indemnified and supported version of OpenDS. Check out the announcement here.

This is a big deal for us in the OpenSSO world because we embed the community version of OpenDS 1.0 in our product as an embedded configuration store and user store today. When we release our next commercial version of the product in September we will embed Sun OpenDS Standard Edition (SE) 1.0. This will allow customers to receive full support and indemnfication for OpenDS as both a configuration store and user store when deploying OpenSSO.

WOWZA! Times are a changin'!

As you can see from the list of articles and blogs below, Sun's OpenSSO Express announcement caught a lot of eyes. We've been getting a lot of questions about the announcement and tremendous interest in the solution as an alternative to traditional approaches.

I think Redmonk's Michael Coté captured some of the key drivers and scenarios that initiatied our interest in creating this model.

"The idea is that companies can quicker access to new features in the OpenSSO build rather than waiting for the longer, full cycle. As a Sun watcher, I like this kind of thing because it’s a simple, straight forward implementation, if you will, of being an open source company. Developers are typically prone to download and start using open source components for projects, esp. small, “just trying this out, ooops, now it’s a big deal for us” types of projects. Providing support for scenarios like that - starting to use OpenSSO instead of Access Manager - is nice for both developers and operations people who have to support the end result."

A key factor to understand about the OpenSSO community is that it primarily consists of enterprises or large organizations that are implementing enterprise scale solutions. We were getting overwhelmed with requests from members to offer support and indemnification for these deployments. With regards to price they evaluated the solution by weighing the cost of buying an AM license versus the cost of hiring internal resources to manage the deployment on their own.

Take a look at the articles below and learn more about what people are saying.

==================

OpenSSO Express on IdentityBuzz
RedMonk's People Over Processors
Michael Cote
July 23, 2008

Sun readies Web stack featuring choice of OSes
InfoWorld
Paul Krill
July 23, 2008

Sun Makes Open Source Announcements: Focus on Web Stack, cloud computing, and security
Dr. Dobb's Journal
July 23, 2008

Sun Microsystems Intros Sun OpenSSO Express for the OpenSSO Project
TMCnet
Anshu Shrivastava
July 23, 2008

Sun Announces OpenSSO Express
Web Host Industry Review
David Hamilton
July 23, 2008

Sun Open SSO to have just one flavor
ZDNet
Dana Blankenhorn
July 21, 2008

Sun offering support for OpenSSO: Company standing behind new version of open source technologies
Network World
John Fontana
July 24, 2008

Sun turns on the AMP: Plus SSO, web hosting and more open sauce
The Inquirer
Dean Pullen
July 24, 2008

OpenSSO Express and the smoking simian
Pushing String:

Sun OpenSSO Express: Sun Web Stack ready to ship
diTii.com | D' Technology Weblog

Sun OpenSSO Express: Industry's First Enterprise Support for Open Source Identity Management
Java Entrepreneur:

OpenSSO Express
The Open Road

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise
Dennis Seah’s Weblog

Sun Microsystems Announces Sun OpenSSO Express
dZone

Free DNS Lookup: Sun offering support for OpenSSO

osdir: Sun readies Web stack featuring choice of OSes

baanmo: Sun OpenSSO Express: Sun Web Stack ready to ship

linker: Sun readies Web stack featuring choice of OSes

Database Management: Sun readies Web stack featuring choice of OSes

UOforums: Sun readies Web stack featuring choice of OSes

Sun OpenSSO Express
Sidharth's Blog

OpenSSO Express: Start your Federation project today with support from Sun
Virtual Nick

The Aquarium: Sun OpenSSO Express - Support for OpenSSO Stable Milestones!

Identity Management Buzz: Today Sun is Announcing Sun's OpenSSO Express

Sun Extends Support to Include OpenSSO Releases
On the Record Blog Entry

If you are wondering why I've been so quiet for the last few weeks it's because my team has been heads-down working on the launch of OpenSSO Express, an early access version of the next release of Access Manager that is fully supported and indemnified by Sun. In short, customers that buy Sun Access Manager now also receive access to OpenSSO Express under a single license.

Customer can choose what they want to deploy. If our commercial builds have all the features you need and you want a traditional offering then use Sun Access Manager. If you are focused on innovation or key features that are not yet supported in our commercial release, but are available via OpenSSO then deploy OpenSSO Express. Regardless of what you choose you get a fully tested offering that includes Sun support and indemnification.

To help explain the benefits of this model I sat down with Redmonk's Michael Coté to discuss. Check out the podcast and let me know what you think!

OpenSSO Express Feature Article

OpenSSO Project

OpenSSO Wiki

Sun Access Manager Product Page

A key benefit of OpenSSO, the open source project used to derive Sun's commercial offering -- Federated Access Manager 8, is that it's 100% Java. This enables Sun to provide one offering that includes access management, federation, and secure web services in a tiny WAR file. Deploy the WAR via your container and you're done. There is no installer!

In addition to providing lots of features, Sun has also begun to leverage other open source projects to improve the usability of OpenSSO. Specifically, OpenSSO now includes an embedded version of OpenDS, an open source community project building a free and comprehensive next generation directory service, based on LDAP and DSML standards. OpenDS is 100% Java, which means it can easily be embedded in OpenSSO and made transparent to the user.

When a user installs OpenSSO they now have the option to choose OpenDS as the embedded directory for the configuration store and/or user store. In other words, a user can deploy OpenSSO without ever having to configure a directory! In Sun's commerical release we plan to support the embedded directory in production for the configuration store only. Using the embedded directory as a user store will only be supported in developer environments.

Props to the Sun engineering team and the OpenSSO community on coming up with another great innovation!

Option 1: OpenSSO Embedded Configuration Store

Option 2: OpenSSO Embedded User Store

We at Sun are doing our darnedest to constantly improve how we communicate with customers. As the only open source WAM, federation and secure web services solution in the market, Sun's Federated Access Manager has a great advantage because we are totally transparent in everything that we do. To that end, I want to share with you our latest innovation in this area -- The Sun Federated Access Manager / OpenSSO Wiki (wiki.opensso.org). This is a public sight that contains everything FAM and OpenSSO. It complements our documentation by providing access to real-time information as it is made available. It also provides a lot of detail around common questions and access to all kind of multimedia. Take a look and enjoy. When you have questions that arise this is a great first stop. ENJOY!

Some great links . . .