Last year, Phil Becker began via a series of articles to lay out of a vision of what he loosely referred to as "the identity router architecture" -- a decoupled, distributed, deal with it as it comes identity infrastructure that resembles how routers handle packets.
This morning I'm reading two excellent articles from John Fontana over at NetworkWorld (yo, John - call me!) about some Microsoft announcements and news from the Directory Experts Conference (DEC). The truly important piece is what Stuart Kwan, director of identity and access at Microsoft, refers to as "the identity bus."
Quoting:
"Kwan said what is needed are 'transformers,' places where data contained within 'claims' about a user can be into changed into different formats depending on an application's need. Kwan said the transformers would be able to handle such things as Kerberos, X.509 certificates and assertions based on SAML...."Transformers allow us to fold, spindle and mutilate the data in any way we want. It lets us adapt to the infrastructure without completely destroying the applications,' Kwan said."
Okay, let's set aside the marketing mishap that is the word "transformers" (more than meets the eye!) for a second -- because this is *exactly* what the identity industry as a whole needs to focus on. Indeed, as Jackson Shaw eludes to in his blog, this is the underlying reason that HP is pulling away from their IdM product set.
The "identity bus" is, of course, still just a vision, but at least it is a beginning. Understanding and building toward an identity industry that is "the identity bus" should be the mission of every serious identity vendor out there.
The second announcement, and the one far less compelling, is that Microsoft is now "considering" support for SAML, SPML and XACML. Sigh. Okay, its not that I'm not sympathetic to Microsoft's situation. After all, if you're Microsoft and you say, "yep we're supporting X" - then you're supporting it for life. And, as we all know, making a wrong call about something like that at Microsoft could put a very quick end to an individual's corporate ladder climbing.
On the other hand, companies 1/1000th the size of Microsoft have found the resources to support and build around varying protocols. I'm glad to see they're considering it, its time to stop considering and start building.
--Eric Norlin
