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Pat Patterson on Identity Management, Federation and Single Malt Scotch

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14 Aug · Mon 2006

...even if it's qualified by 'so-called' and my cluefulness is called into question

James McGovern asks

when was the last time he [Pat Patterson of Sun] asked members of Project Liberty to start sharing pain points outside of the Project Liberty forum for others to consume and learn from?

Well - that's precisely what many members of Project Liberty recently did in the recent Identity Open Space in Vancouver. As its name suggests, this event was open to all-comers and jointly produced by the Liberty Alliance Project and some of the leading participants in the Internet Identity Workshop. We had some fascinating discussions, mostly documented (to greater or lesser extent) in the wiki.

Another interesting aspect of this event was that (as I blogged previously) IOS attendees were able to also attend Liberty's plenary sessions (under NDA), observing and even contributing to the discussion. My understanding (and no warranty, express or implied, is attached to this statement) is that the Liberty folks were very happy with the way this all turned out and keen to repeat it regularly in the future.

In the meantime, there will be another IOS next month in Santa Clara. Although this IOS is in association with the Digital ID World Conference, I wouldn't be surprised to see many of the Liberty folks there.

See you there, James?

@ 03:45 PM PDT Comments [3]

Comments:

I have been attempting to setup a panel at an industry conference on the topic of federated identity where competitors share the same external users but haven't had any luck. So far, the conversation at conferences has been more about all the wonderful things that vendors do for their customers instead of the wonderful things customers do for themselves. Any assistance in this regard is appreciated...

Posted by James on August 15, 2006 at 03:45 AM PDT #

I think such a panel would be a great idea. I can think of one or two Sun customers that would be candidates, but there is a general problem here...

To appear in public on such a panel, the customer would divulge which product they are using, for good or bad, in effect becoming references for that vendor's product.

For whatever reason, this seems to cause a lot of customers some heartburn. Maybe they are holding referenceability as a bargaining chip to get some niggling problem fixed. Maybe there is internal policy against favouring any one vendor. Maybe the customer doesn't want to sacrifice competitive position by revealing the technology on which they rely.

In any case, while we do have some great reference customers (go BIPAC - yay!), and more lined up, it's an ongoing task. Perhaps you could lean on your enterprise architect peers at other customers???

Posted by Superpat on August 16, 2006 at 02:13 PM PDT #

Not sure about the other stuff :) but the quote is (loosely) from Frankenstein. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021884/quotes "Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!" -Henry (aka Hank) Frankenstein

Posted by ThinGuy on August 17, 2006 at 05:31 PM PDT #