Having just read about Mark’s exploits in Vegas and being reminded about a conversation he and I had, I ended up trawling back through my posts to find the conversation in question. I think this is what he was talking about. Funny to see I wrote this all the way back at IIW2005… time flies. Mark raises the question how hard would it be to “become someone else?” He claims:
I’ll be joining Lori Rowland of Burton Group and Edward Saba of Sun to talk about compliant provisioning and how Sun and Approva have implemented it. Check us out this Thursday, July 12th, at 11 Eastern. You can register here.
So Catalyst is winding down. And as usual a good time was had by all. A couple of notable quotes from the week:
As for thoughts on the Catalyst content… There was still a lot of conversation around user-centric identity. I think Bob’s comparison of new and old school identity systems, which nicely compared federation to user-centric identity, was an excellent primer. Personally, if they had stopped with just that presentation, I would have been happy and not needed anything else on the topic. Having heard a few presentations on fine grained authorization, I still am trying to figure out the root cause behind it all. I’m unclear of what is really driving people to expose their applications’ authorization models. I think, and this is just my speculation, that cause behind this is that user provisioning systems have done a relatively poor job in managing entitlements. Am I on the right path here? Finally, I had a lot of conversations on advanced provisioning. Deployments are maturing. Companies are looking for other ways to get value out them and at the same time make their services more relevant to the business. I wish the workshop that Lori did on these topics was, instead, delivered as sessions during the main conference. There are a lot of pent up conversations on this broad topic and Burton can easily tap them. I am sitting in SFO right now headed to ABQ and on to Santa Fe for a little vacation. (BTW, how many state capitals don’t have airports? Santa Fe is one, but think there are others.) By the time I get into Santa Fe, the iPhone will be out in the wild. I am very much tempted to go to an AT&T store and get one… we’ll see. Enjoy iPhone day everyone and have a great upcoming 4th of July.
I haven’t processed the shots I took at Catalyst this evening. Needless to say, they won’t be as good as Bob’s. I rarely like photos of myself, but I do like this one.
Last night I had dinner with a cast of characters:
We grabbed a late batch of dim sum at Ton Kiang. Good stuff I have to say. One of the things that Mark Mc and noticed was that the identity market is remarkably small. It is definitely a good thing that ex-Access360/IBM, Thor/Oracle, Waveset/Sun guys can break bread and have a laugh over the deals that we used to compete. It’s that (grudging, at times) comradery in this market that I love and it is one the things that makes Catalyst so much fun.
I think I stayed in the exact same room last year. It faces west and on a day like today, the wind whips on from the west and slams into the windows. The windows open about an inch. And if you open them, you create a very interesting wind pattern in your room, one that makes a LOT of noise. Cross the sounds of Hell that Dante described with a sound a small jet engine. I apologize to those of you on the 38th floor… but I kind of like staying in a room the sounds like a sound stage for Ghost Busters. I’ll be headed to dinner to night with the identitystuff crew. Should be good fun. I’ve got the Pentax with me so I’ll try and upload shots when I can.
Mark was kind enough to recommend a few new watering holes in San Francisco. He also made his own mashup to create Cataclysmic Catalyst. In that vein of thought, I give you a snigglet: Paracatalysis - the identity market-wide halt during Catalyst. Paracatalysis continues into the week after Catalyst as well. Given that the following week is also July 4th week and that the 4th is a Wednesday, pretty much puts the identity market (at least here in the States) to sleep for two whole weeks. As one who will be at Mark’s dinner, I am thankful that there will be no kilt involved. Having seen it once was plenty.
Anyone got the new Self-Service user interface working for ITIM. I’ve got it installed properly, I think. When I try and log I get:
An error occurred while processing the attempt to log in.
Any ideas?
On one hand I can’t say I am that surprised. SAP has been itching to get into the IdM market. There was speculation that they were going to build their own. It is interesting to see that they have chosen, as many others have, to buy instead. I am, however, a little surprised in who SAP purchased. MaXware was known, primarily, as one of the three major meta/virtual directory companies out there. Maybe SAP saw wisdom in Oracle buying OctetString? (I’d be feeling pretty lonely right now if I was Radiant Logic.) Maybe SAP really just needed the connectivity that MaXware could provide? I wonder what this means for corporate SAP partners who are already in the identity management space? If I am a provisioning vendor who has spent resources developing integration to SAP and the Virsa bits, I am going to be pretty annoyed that SAP just bought a provisioning technology. Integration partner one day, direct competitor another. The real reason SAP made this move is the continuing SAP – Oracle War. SAP needs to be able to check the boxes off in an RFP that they have provisioning and identity management services. If SAP is looking to even the playing field, there’s at least one more acquisitions they have to do. They need to buy a large services company likes of Accenture or Booz Allen Hamilton. Granted, doing that will agitate their service partners, but that being said, it would round off SAP and enable them to go toe-to-toe with Oracle. In closing, I wanted to include a few insightful thoughts from Jackson Shaw. I just discovered his blog… good stuff. Jackson writes:
Apologies to Lewis Carol and the Cheshire Cat. Mark MacAuley makes me laugh. He is a funny guy, but that’s not why he makes me laugh. He makes me laugh when he finds situations like this one:
I spoke to a non-US Government Agency yesterday about their Identity Management initiative. Turns out they are hung up on an architecture. Why? Because there is no identifiable (or identified) business process for them to build for. The business users are saying - Just buy a tool and it’ll take care of it that’s what their workflows are for’. Those of us who do this for a living are probably smirking or laughing out loud at the comment. Typical, but one of the leading causes of unsuccessful projects.