Sun/Microsoft interop and the way forward...
Well, it's been a year now, as our CTO Greg Papadopoulos recently pointed out. Something weird's going down: Sun and Microsoft jointly host an update session and a demonstration of product interoperability. Here's the feature article, on sun.com . "Who'd a thought it?" (which, if you have no interest in interoperable authentication, is also the name of a good pub you might like to check out).
Several of my hard-working colleagues, and their Microsoft counterparts, will today show the results of months of collaboration, in the form of interoperable authentication between Liberty (ID-FF) and Web Services Federation (WS-F) compliant products.
The technology agreement between the two companies included the establishment of a customer advisory board, so that we could have some impartial input about what we should work on. (I can just imagine the alternative - two teams of slightly nervous techies, peeking shiftily at each other from opposite sides of the room... just like a school dance...).
Anyway, interoperable authentication was high on the list, so we have, jointly, done it. Congratulations to both interop teams for all the work they have put in to take this from conception through specification and into the light of day!
And that's a key point: "why a whole year?" has been the cry. Well, that cycle from vision to deployment is not always a quick one, and there were two pretty entrenched camps at the outset. However, I think this gives a really clear indication of what can be achieved where there's a will - and that will shows no sign of abating.
What comes next, then? The effect of interoperability (or standardisation) is that it raises the bar for innovation and added value, which is a good thing. The more functions become interoperable and 'sediment' into the operating system or the server stack, the more we have to think (as vendors) about how to add value.
As it happens, I think there's plenty still to do to bridge the gap between open, interoperable authentication and the pressing problems customers are expressing to us at the business level.
For instance: how should customers implement this identity technology in ways which minimise the possibility of identity theft? How can we drive IT security more effectively through business-level policy control? How can we exploit federated identity to achieve better risk management?
Openness is good; interoperability is good; obliging us to work harder at adding value is good... keep it up!
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