Burton Group to prove multi-protocol federated identity can work by ZDNet's Chris Jablonski : Burton Group is going to demonstrate the first multi-protocol federal identity system to prove that multiple federated identity protocols and standards can coexist at its Catalyst Conference North America 2005 on July 13, in San Diego.
"Enterprises deploying federated identity are faced with a mix of standards and protocols, including multiple versions of SAML, Liberty Alliance ID-FF, and Shibboleth, plus products that are starting to support the WS-Federation passive profile," said Gerry Gebel, Burton Group senior analyst. "Participants in this event will demonstrate how partners can share identity information regardless of their chosen federated identity product."
Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief identity architect, believes that Microsoft has an important role to play in enabling identity, rather than seeing it as a revenue center. Well, I'm not too sure about that philosophy, but do believe that Identity, Access & Policy Managemnent are key components in todays technology marketspace.
For starters, "federation" is a means by which individuals or machines authenticate themselves using their credentials, and then be able to access resources in other enterprises and/or organizations without having to authenticate themselves all over again. Sounds like single sign on, doesnt it. Well, It is single sign on in a way. just extended to span outside of the enterprise that the individual belongs to.
The Liberty Alliance has released it's specifications of how identity management systems should work. The Liberty Alliance, as the name suggests, is a coalition of about 70 major industry players, including Sun Microsystems, AOL/Time Warner, Hewlett-Packard, and other major players in market sectors like telecom, wireless, and finance.
Sun being one of the foremost of the industry leaders in evangelising this technology now has Microsoft working in conjunction towards a singular vision.
VISION: The Network Is The Computer
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Sun was founded with one driving vision. A vision of computers that talk to each other no matter who built them. A vision in which technology works for you, not the other way around. While others protected proprietary, stand-alone architectures, we focused on taking companies into the network age, providing systems and software with the scalability and reliability needed to drive the electronic marketplace.
Anyway, getting back to the subject of multi protocol federated identity systems, I'd like to see this burton group report on Shibboleth, Liberty Enabled Systems, SWITCHaai & WS-Federation all interoperate !!! After all this report is not published just for fun aye !
In the midst of all this, If I could quote Craig Barrett :
"When you have common interfaces, common protocols, then everyone can innovate and everyone can interoperate. Companies can build their businesses, consumers can expand their choices, the technology moves forward faster, and users get more benefit."
So very true wasnt he ?
All this reminds me of the simple rule : IF "A" trusts "B", and if "B" trusts "C", inadvertently, "A" trusts "C".. emm.. now that's a translation from my old math school formula of "A=B=C". SO IF we apply that to the following:
IF this is true, and IF this is true, then we probably should see something in the likeness of a SUN-IBM interop soon 
After all the much awaited move was done quite a while ago. I guess that we're just awaiting an answer from IBM.
MAN !!! am I dying to obtain a copy of this report... You betcha !!
After all the much awaited move was done quite a while ago. I guess that we're just awaiting an answer from IBM.