Microsoft's Geneva

I mentioned in my previous post about The Experts Conference that the most interesting sessions will be about identity as a service, identity in the cloud and software as a service. It's pretty clear from what's been going on down at the PDC that identity is being featured pretty darn heavily.

Let me draw your attention to Burton Group's Gerry Gebel and his post on this topic: Microsoft and the SAML protocol come together in Geneva which sums things up pretty well. Microsoft's support for SAML 2.0 is key and, in some ways, earth shattering. My hat is off to Kim because I am positive he help drive Microsoft to this conclusion. I've always believed that interoperability is the first step to migration. You may never migrate, or you may take a long time before you migrate but having interop gives you doors to go through that were previously locked.

Gerry asks the following:

The next step we’re waiting to hear about is entitlement management and policy enforcement. Today, that is still handled by the developer within the business application. Will Microsoft also externalize that function a la entitlement management tools?

I sure hope so. Oh, and if (when) they do, we will move from earth shattering to galaxy shattering. Whether you will use Microsoft Geneva or use the entitlement management tools they might (or might not be) building doesn't matter. What I do know is that when Microsoft enters a market they tend to put tremendous downward pressure on pricing. I don't know about you but I certainly don't want to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for entitlement management tools or federated interoperability products. I absolutely want to see Microsoft jump into these pools! If you, Mr. Customer, are looking at any of these solution you will also want to see Microsoft jump into these pools.

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identity management, federation, SAML, identity, Microsoft, MSFT, Burton Group, Kim Cameron