Adventures of an Eternal Optimist

Acquisitions!  Can’t live with ‘em, can’t wait until they stop holding up progress.   At least now we have new fodder for speculation.

What’s great about the Snoracle merger finalizing:  already I’ve seen more blogs from more people in “the know” who are reaching out than I can recall ever seeing from the Identity team at Oracle.   Nishant has always been the sole Oracle blogger in my acquaintance, but a few other voices are being heard – if you aren’t listening, you should be!  I am really excited about the idea that this merger could herald a cultural shift at Oracle towards more transparency.

The dust has settled on the initial announcements, and the big surprise is that OIM (previously Thor) has been chosen as the strategic provisioning product.  I can see all sorts of technical reasons why this might be the case – I imagine that the original Thor product had already been heavily retooled for integration into the fusion middleware suite.  Any other strategic considerations (size of existing customer base, ease of expansion, etc) really don’t have as much weight as those of us on the outside had been assigning for a simple reason:  the Waveset customer base is captive. There is no competitor right on the heels of either OIM or Waveset, no hungry beast to prey on dissatisfaction or fear around assimilation costs or adapter growth/expansion for Waveset.  As such, Oracle can play it cool by supporting Waveset long enough to appease nervous customers, cherrypick the functionality that is missing from OIM, and eventually find a migration path once the dust has settled.

So then, we have the following communities:  1) Existing OIM customers, who are relieved I’m sure. 2) Existing Waveset customers, who are probably unimpressed, but who will hopefully be well supported and given a migration path. 3) New customers, who are in the worst position, having had their choices narrowed. Will prospective customers keep asking for “Oracle Waveset” (the re-rebranded name of Sun Identity Manager)?  Or will memories fade fast?  There is a hole now – will another product fortuitously step in, for example Forefront Identity Manager 2009 2010?

I also wonder what kind of pressure SaaS will put on applications that traditionally are provisioning hard cases.  If you are an software vendor competing against SaaS services, and that SaaS service offers a provisioning API that allows for a 10-minute integration into an automated Enterprise infrastructure, wouldn’t you be worried? Will bricks & mortar software companies feel compelled to compete?   I hope and pray that this will be the case – and frankly I can’t figure out why on earth any software vendor would prefer to have a provisioning tool bypass its core logic and reach into the backend database to twiddle bits.

The access front is interesting, if not surprising.  Given that OpenSSO was opensourced, I don’t think anyone really felt it was likely to replace OAM, but in this case there is a migration path that sees customers stay with the pre-Oracle codebase and maintain the code themselves (I hear there are integrators out there already offering up a new neck to choke with respect to codebase management and support).  Oracle has said that there are a few things that they will adopt from OpenSSO, but I imagine that the opensourcyness of OpenSSO might be a barrier there, most engineers I know are loathe to mix license types in a product.

No matter what happens, at least it’s now able to happen openly.  As Green Day sings:  “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end“.  The world marches on, but I’ll always remember the long hours I spent in the Sparc 1 and Sparc 2 labs at university; on Sparc 5′s and 20′s at the beginning of my career; and the time spent on the ever-renamed directory that started at Netscape, went to iPlanet, then SunOne, then suffered from all sorts of horrible marketing mangling around “Java” and “Enterprise”.  The pre-marketing-mangled Sun brands will always make me smile; they were representative of a bright shiny world that I felt awed to be a part of.

I believe that what Apple releases next week will herald the end of broad adoption of general computing devices.   The introduction of their tablet will begin in earnest a trend towards tightly integrated, tightly controlled sealed-hardware computer devices that allow the majority of the population to accomplish the most popular computing tasks without doing anything more than visiting the app store.  Not as your “mobile” computing solution by the way — as your only computing solution.

Why wouldn’t the world move in this direction?  Why shouldn’t your computer be as easy to use as your smartphone? Why fiddle with drivers and desktops and operating systems if all you ever do is surf the web and send email to your grandchildren?  Even if you want more than the basics, why go through long and complicated application installs when you can just click a button?

This is the future, and those of us in industries like identity management had better stop and pause right now, because per-application passwords have no place in the world of the app store.  They are difficult to type on a touchscreen, and inconvenient in exactly the way that the new push-button paradigm seeks to overcome.   This could be the best thing — or the worst thing to happen to those of us working on protocols which replace password storage.

There is no doubt that passwords *will* be hidden from the user from now on.  In the same way that nobody types a telephone number into their phone anymore (they just use Contacts),  nobody will type a username or a password.  Heck, they won’t even type the URL of the service.  Details will be hidden, the pain taken away.  We have a small window in time to affect the way in which that happens, before users forget what it was like to have to figure out which user name went with which password and which site.

Don’t believe me?  If you have an iPhone, you should try PageOnce‘s Personal Assistant app.  I reviewed PageOnce ages ago:  it aggregates accounts of all kinds, giving a consolidated dashboard and allowing you to login without typing your password.  I panned the service: not only do you have to give your passwords away, but you have to go out of your way to pageonce for that very first account login – why do that when you can go directly to the website and log in?   On a general purpose computing device, the service has no use to me.  On the iPhone however?   Pure solid gold.  Clicking that little “Personal Assistant” icon is always easier than typing in a URL for the original website.  Not only do I never have to remember credentials, I am essentially given a menu of my accounts, and I’m one click away from transacting.

But, you say – it’s just mobile.   What really matters is the desktop.  I say you’re wrong.   I say that the ubiquity of the smartphone is coming to a desktop near you, courtesy of Apple Computers Inc.  I say that we had better *start* our strategy thinking about what happens when a user has an expectation that authentication should be no more complicated than making a phone call on a smartphone.

If we don’t make it that easy, somebody else will do it.  Of that you can rest assured.

I’m really happy to report that today I join the board of directors of the OpenID Foundation, representing Ping Identity.  This is a big decision for us! It reflects not only our strategic conclusion that OpenID is a critical part of the ecosystem that will evolve in this new decade, but also our tactical roadmap, driven by our customers and their use cases.

From a personal perspective, I am excited to be able to more closely work with all the smart folks that I’ve been rubbing shoulders with for years and years at IIW, and to literally have time allocated in my week to focus both on OpenID technology and community tasks.  I believe 2010 will see renewal and acceleration in both consumer identity and enterprise identity: having a small part in that growth will be fascinating.

Check out the Ping Identity Press Release here.