Ian Glazer

Just back from this year’s volcano-delayed Catalyst EU. In the 8+ years I’ve had a relationship with Burton Group, as a customer, vendor, and employee, I’ve never been to an EU Catalyst until this year. Long overdue to say the least.

This was the first time we’ve had a plenary session to kick Catalyst off and I think it worked very well indeed. John Seely Brown roamed around some Pull-related topics – quite germane given Bob’s talk on the emerging identity architecture. (BTW, it was great to see Jamie Lewis on stage presenting to a Catalyst audience.)

Day 2 was identity day. Bob laid out the emerging identity architecture. I compressed a year’s worth of IdM market activity into 30 minutes as well as delivered our intervention for provisioning. We heard an amazing case study from Philips as well as from an IAG deployment. Matthew Gardiner of CA and Tony Nadalin of Microsoft talked to the audience about trust frameworks and ICAM. Kim Cameron closed things out with his thoughts on an interscalar directory, serving as a perfect bookend to our thoughts on a pull-based identity management architecture.

Common themes I heard at Catalyst:

• Although people seemed quite receptive to a pull-based identity world, there was some consternation over when we’ll see identity brokers and oracles as real businesses appear.
• Organizations are quite interested in a claims-based identity infrastructure but unsure when they can get there due to budget cycles and other realities of business.
• Federation is more relevant than ever.
• People get the split between IAG and provisioning – now they are trying to assess the best way forward.
• Getting value out of national identity programs has for too long been about maximizing value to the State. If you want real adoption, there has to be a meaningful, FUD-less value proposition for the citizen. (Ignore this and your national identity system will be over shadowed by alternatives provided by banks.)
• Entitlements, entitlement, entitlements – a lot of the one-on-one meetings I had revolved around cataloging and managing entitlements. (Good thing there’s a report on this due out in the summer.)

Clearly, attendees overcame the volcano blues and showed up in Prague looking for answers. The questions from the audience were tough and focused on real business problems. The scenarios shared in one-on-one meetings were immediately relevant and certainly non-trivial… all the kinds of things you’d expect from a Catalyst.

30 days to Catalyst North America. We’ve got more identity sessions as well as a half-day on privacy. Bring your “A” game; we are.

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Category: Identity Management Market     Tags: #cat10, federation, iag, ICAM

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