A more perfect union of ID management schemes

William Jackson of Government Computer News writes about the Kantara Initiative in the article "A more perfect union of ID management schemes."

Big Changes!

Yesterday, my plan was to write a post announcing some changes at Project Liberty. I was distracted by the announcement that Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems! Some other interesting coverage can be found here.

Now, the other big news!

The Liberty Alliance Project announced formation of a new organization known as the Kantara Initiative. Kantara is an organization with a much more accessible approach to its membership. It carries an Intellectual Property structure that is much more flexible and should allow for a greater ability to bridge between industry communities working on identity services. Brett McDowell, Executive Director of Liberty Alliance Project, gives an overview of the Kantara Initiative here:


One of the first big differences between Project Liberty and Kantara is that Kantara will be not be setting standards. Instead work groups will define recommendations to share with other standards setting organizations (SSOs). For example, the work on IGF AAPML, and various protocol profiles for IGF will likely each be referred to the SSO organization responsible for the parent specification.

For those following IGF and Project Aristotle, the work continues under the Kantara Initiative. One of the cool new features of the Kantara Initiative is the ability to support multiple open source projects with different licenses. This means it will be a lot easier to support a more diverse open source community. As an example, for Project Aristotle, it will make it a lot easier to work with the Higgins community now that we have a way to bridge between EPL and Apache licensing.

It seems that the themes of bridging and harmonization are in the air!

Qualcomm's Todd Beets on Identity Management

Todd Beets, Senior Enterprise Architect at Qualcomm is interviewed by Oracle's Hormazd Romer about Oracle Identity Management. See the video here:



Todd talks about a new phase of their identity services offering where Qualcomm can offload the responsibility of managing identity from within applications and move identity management to a shares services infrastructure -- letting developers focus on business logic!