This morning, my colleague Hubert Le Van Gong drew my attention to the Liberty Alliance group on LinkedIn. It is great to see an expanding number of Identity Management groups available on LinkedIn.  I currently belong to these LinkedIn groups which are focused on Identity Management or Information Security topics:

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Information Security

Last night I got an email from Martin Gee, CTO of IC Synergy, pointing out some intriguing blog posts he had written about Access Request functionality his company has created to augment Sun Identity Management software.

I will post comments Martin’s post on these subjects soon, but I would first like to share a comment Martin made in a post he drafted back in August, entitled “What good is Open Source without Support?“

After describing how one of the talented IC Synergy engineers was able to fix a thorny problem because he had access to Open Source code, Martin opined,

“Open Source changes the escalation process. If you have folks that are talented enough to navigate the product code base, interpret the functionally and recompile the code, you have a tactical advantage. Typically you’d work the forums and support process for a couple of weeks with mixed results. Now, in most situations you can by pass layers of support and shorten the patch process. Win / Win in my book.”

“Tactical advantage” makes business sense. For IC Synergy at least, Open Source isn’t just nice to have. It makes a real difference to their business.

Technorati Tags: IC Synergy, Open Source

In a recent conversation with Pat Patterson, Sun’s dynamic OpenSSO community advocate, he referenced a recent blog post highlighting how six of the top twenty contributors to the OpenSSO project came from individuals outside of Sun.  These external contributions, such as those associated with the The Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB), illustrate how fundamental innovation is accelerated by the Open Source model.  It is great to see members of the growing OpenSSO community really working to deliver value to each other.

Technorati Tags: OpenSSO, Open Source

Today’s cover story from USA Today’s sport section extolled the rising fortunes of my alma mater’s football team.  I’m old enough to have been in BYU stadium to see the home games leading to BYU’s 1984 national championship.  It is great to see the level of on the field and off the field performance by the current team. We are doubly excited to see the exploits of Max Hall, the BYU quarterback, who went to high school in Mesa, Arizona, where we now live.

Technorati Tags: BYU, Football, Brigham Young

Welcome to La Jolla, California, the Jewel of San Diego!  I learned this evening that “La Jolla” literally means “the Jewel” in Spanish.

I arrived this evening at the Marriott hotel, and will spend the next three days with Sun’s western region sales team. After taking quite a hiatus from blogging over the past few weeks, I look forward to getting back on line.

Yesterday, September 30, 2008, Sun Microsystems officially unveiled OpenSSO Enterprise, Sun’s “Next-Generation Access Management, Federation and Secure Web Services Solution.”

Over three years ago, way back on July 13, 2005, just two months after I wrote my first post on this blog, Sun announced at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference “plans to open source its web site authentication and web single sign-on (SSO) technologies through the Open Source Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project.”  I gave the announcement only one sentence of coverage: “Open SSO will provide source code for basic identity services including Authentication, Single-domain SSO, and Web and J2EE agents.”

Yesterday’s announcement was, in a way, a celebration of that early foray into the world of open source.  What began as a virtual toe-dip led to complete immersion in open source waters.  OpenSSO Enterprise is a result of putting Sun putting its entire access and federation management code base into the open source domain, providing a transparent and progressive forum for collaborative development.  The innovations apparent in this newly released product owe much to the many external contributors to the OpenSSO project.

It is exciting to see the fruits of Sun’s open source strategy unfold.

Technorati Tags: OpenSSO, Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity