Weekly Review: Opportunities Lie in Digital Identity

A hidden theme running through several news announcements in the past two weeks has been the growing strategic importance of digital identity. The first of these news items was Microsoft's announcement of its TrustBridge initiative two weeks ago (see Microsoft-Sun Web Services War Heats Up). But Microsoft has not handled its entry into the digital identity sphere particularly well, and its rivals seem to have sensed that its vulnerability has left open an opportunity for someone else to seize the initiative. Digital identity has now become a major new battleground for dominance, and some very big names have been throwing their hats into the ring.

Read and React

"With Microsoft and Sun's Liberty Alliance both confined to the sidelines while they wait for their vaporware specifications to crystallize into something more substantial, Novell, Critical Path and indeed AOL now have an opportunity to make their marks in a sector that without doubt will be one of the most important infrastructure categories in the Web services environment." Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

The most interesting of these — and certainly the one that Microsoft sees as its most formidable foe — is AOL Time Warner. An article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal lifted the lid on AOL's quiet unveiling of its enterprise services portfolio. What are the three types of service that AOL has chosen to lead with in its assault on the corporate market? Content, obviously, and services based on its instant messaging technology, of course. But first on the list comes "identity services, such as directory servers that centralize application settings and user profiles" (see AOL Angles for Business Market Share).

Novell Gets in the Flow With SilverStream
Novell's $212 million bid for Web services platform vendor SilverStream Software rammed home the context that has made digital identity become so important (see Novell's $212M Web Services Wager). Novell's greatest technology asset in recent years has been eDirectory, a directory services platform that provides the engine for managing digital identity within a network. Novell has not been able to gain widespread market penetration for eDirectory because it is not allied with any core platform technologies.

Creating a compelling role for eDirectory is one of the primary rationales for buying SilverStream, which owns one of the leading pureplay platforms for developing and deploying enterprise Web services. Effective management of digital identity is the key to controlling access to network resources. Since Web services are, by definition, network resources, then it follows that digital identity is the key to controlling access to Web services. By fusing SilverStream's platform with its own eDirectory, Novell will take two half-propositions and create a whole that is worth a great deal more than the value its parts have been able to command.

If the acquisition does indeed recreate Novell as a network platform vendor, it will be a return almost from the dead for the company whose Netware server platform once dominated PC networking. It will be sweet revenge, too, if it ends up taking market share from Microsoft, whose Windows NT server was the agent of its demise.

Critical Path to Directory Services
Whenever a new form of technology gains in importance, the market opens up and rank outsiders find themselves in a position to gain an unexpected foothold. Even Critical Path could storm back into a significant position, now that it has shaken off its legal and financial difficulties and relaunched its product and services portfolio (see Critical Path Making 'Critical Moves').

The company owns the high-performance directory services technology on which AOL's digital identity servers (via iPlanet) were originally based. Identity Management, which covers meta-directory and directory services remains one of its three primary target markets, alongside its better-known enterprise and carrier messaging offerings.

Microsoft and Sun Waiting on a Spec
As for Microsoft, the TrustBridge announcement has quickly filled the gap left when it pulled back from its Hailstorm (a.k.a. .NET My Services) initiative. But the necessary pause in momentum while it repositions and repackages the Passport digital identity proposition that formed a key part of Hailstorm has left the company looking and sounding uncharacteristically off-balance (see Microsoft Still in Control). Nor is TrustBridge anything more than a vision right now. There is nothing shippable today, whereas competitors have spun their competing pitches around available products.

The only exception being Sun, of course, which having set up the Liberty Alliance in opposition to HailStorm now has to wait until the industry body gets round to defining specifications that its products will then have to conform to. It launched its own digital identity portfolio last month, but has been hampered by having to promise forward compatibility with the Liberty Alliance specifications once they are agreed (see Sun, RSA Get Cozy Over Network Identity).

With Microsoft and Sun's Liberty Alliance both confined to the sidelines while they wait for their vaporware specifications to crystallize into something more substantial, smaller or less fancied vendors such as Novell, Critical Path and indeed AOL now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make their marks in a sector that without doubt will be one of the most important infrastructure categories in the Web services environment.

What is it that makes identity so important? I can't put it any better today than I did back in July 2000, in edition 1.0 of the ASPnews report Internet Application Engines:

"In an environment where users can come from anywhere and resources have no fixed physical location, the only way to prove identity and access resources is by reference to a secure, efficient and impeccably trustworthy directory database ... The provider or vendor who holds the keys to directory therefore holds the keys to the entire Internet infrastructure."

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