I haven’t blogged here for awhile, and being honest there is extraordinary change happening in our industry that anything I posted here could need to be re-written. In the meanwhile, the business of enterprise software is coming under intense pressure as I imagined it would as cheaper and more robust applications and services come online. Just today, Marc Andreessen takes aim at software giant Oracle and how economic pressure along with lower cost cloud computing alternatives to enterprise software is shaking the very foundations that information systems are built upon and how they are deployed and consumed by start-ups and the SMB market.

Within the Identity Management (IdM) space, this trend could not be more profound. As companies migrate away from enterprise software deployments towards SaaS apps in droves, the justification for enterprise IdM (or WAM) solution does not fit quite as nicely as it once did. In fact, looking at the success of SalesForce.com and availability and support of modern protocols for 3rd party SSO integration (SAML/OAuth, etc…) and many other apps following suit, the options for SaaS apps continues to present viable alternatives and following this logic, more nimble IdM deployments at a fraction of the cost. Looking at Identity & Infrastructure management from VMware perspective there is a comprehensive set of technologies that can be used to build, run, deploy and secure robust business applications. Today, many of these are deployed using a Public Cloud service (somebody else’s infrastructure) but as this technology moves along on the technology adoption curve and some trust/assurance/liability questions are answered, it will gain more momentum and extend its reach into the enterprise space. In certain cases where security or high assurance is needed, an on-premise (Private Cloud) solution that can be tailored to a company’s or government’s specific requirements would be necessary.

Coming back to the Andreessen article and with all due respect to Oracle as a great and mighty successful American company, a lot more folks are taking notice to what I have been saying for some time now. From an investor perspective Oracle might be a good place to keep your assets safe, but with a growing list of compelling alternatives, if Oracle would stop charging prices like it’s 1999 (or 2007) the situation would not seem as dire as they appear they might become. Many of Oracle products are now available through their On-Demand network for more SaaS model services but will that be enough (making them available as a SaaS service) to make good with customers and keep the competition off their heels? Disclaimer: Having never used Oracle On-Demand services I can only venture to guess that even their SaaS model services are priced with premiums.

On the other hand, VMware continues to make interesting strides in virtualizing mobile platforms along with which a user’s identity and entitlements must travel. Access policies, provisioning and compliance must be monitored and controlled across mobile applications and platforms. So with VMware’s Thin App provisioning (the dev team for the latest incarnation being a great group of guys in my neighborhood right up here in Bellevue, Wa) and entitlements around who can access what, the tools available for managing identities across clouds and devices gets even more interesting!

Godspeed, dear innovation! What say you? What do you have to gain or lose with lower cost IdM implementations and more efficient computing platforms?

Happy New Year, everyone! It’s been a couple months since my last post, so I thought I’d better get with the program and keep fresh updates coming. In addition to a few other goals of mine for the new year, which I’m sure a lot of you have as well, writing more about IdM and the industry here in my blog is among them. So while I enjoyed reading IdM prognostications here and here, I will take a few moments and make an attempt at giving a few of my own from my tiny perspective on the world of IdM.

It hasn’t been too long since I last gave some predictions about the future of IdM, but since then there have been some interesting developments. First of all I should give the usual disclaimer that I am giving my own opinions in this blog post, and not speaking officially on behalf of VMware. With that said, let’s talk about IdM.

The industry has been abuzz with ideas about “Identity As a Service” or IDaaS for short (as if we needed more acronyms!), with different approaches layed out succinctly by Frank Villavicencio in a blog post back in 2010. However, without taking pain to spell out, it is a trend that can easily be marginalized as another service bus that must be deployed and managed in an enterprise without much thought about leveraging new deployment models such as public or private clouds. In fact, VMware has a lot of API and SOA based (so-called) Identity Services. While they are consumed very much like any Web Service, they are not being managed or deployed differently than any business application.

Latourell Falls, 2003

I remember the first time I heard about an appliance for managed IdM back in 2005 that was pitched by Oblix at a customer meeting. While we will see these technologies like Web Services, Identity APIs and SAML used throughout the organization, I think in 2011 we will see the appliance based IdM implementations accelerating and taking hold nicely and at a much faster pace. Well even if not so new, they will be embraced for sure. With new products from VMware like vCloud Director and the bounty that vCenter will enjoy from the Ionix acquisition in 2010, it will offer architects and IT leaders more robust tools for efficiently deploying and managing their IdM services and infrastructures. This is one of the biggest opportunities in the data center today, I feel, which IdM in a broader sense is positioned incredibly well to benefit from.

Which leads me to how I see the two major forces in play that will profoundly affect the way companies adopt and manage IdM in the coming year.

• Consolidation – (And I’m not talking about acquisitions…) Driven by the desire to reduce costs of managing large data centers,and taking advantage of opportunities to more effectively utilize a disaster recovery zone, cloud models for computing will allow us to achieve re-use and consolidation much more efficiently than previously possible. This will be an essential strategy for Directors and managers to add to their IT playbooks as most companies will begin to move alot of their apps to some form of cloud-based computing model, and we desparately don’t want to migrate server sprawl or VM sprawl practices into the cloud.
• Next Gen IdM – Back in June I keyed into the idea that Identity & Access services will be available in the “drinking water” (just look at Salesforce) and as more partnerships form, trust will be further established and companies will begin to leverage more SaaS and PaaS services where IdM is just one of the services available in that environment. With VMware’s acquisition of Tri-Cipher in 2010, imagine the possibilities of this (or what would become of any 3rd party partnership) when IdM capabilities exist in the platform that you deploy your cloud apps on (Think VMforce, vFabric, or any other vendors (which I could mention but won’t *wink*) who may be using OpenSSO, Shibboleth, Facebook Connect, etc… for their IdAM requirements.

After giving one of my talks at Open World last year, I was approached by (of all people…) a security architect from Microsoft who pressed me with the question about “What makes this any different because at the end of the day, it’s still a Web Service, right?” Well for one thing, maybe the guy attended the wrong conference because we covered a lot of ground at VMworld 2010! On a more serious note, what we are seeing is not just consuming services but the way these services are deployed and managed. Incidentally, I came across a new hash tag today, perhaps this will be the newly recognized trend in 2011 #MSHyperVfail Anybody?

All biases aside, the ways in which you will be able to deploy, manage HA and achieve distributed computing models will be fundamentally different than we have for the most part been able to achieve. But the best thing yet is that when it comes to Identity & Access management, the cost and complexity barriers will be significantly less than we know it today.

It’s been a little over a week since OOW, and finally getting back into the swing of things. I should say up front that while I spoke at Oracle Open World, this was not a general session like VMworld, but instead I spoke from the VMware booth at Oracle Open World. Not only was it great hanging out with some really cool folks from the marketing teams from VMware (which I never get to do) I also had the chance to speak directly with Oracle and VMware partners and customers about the cool things that me and my team at VMware have been working on over the past 18 months. It was a throwback to my consulting days at Oracle, which were great, but with the liberty to share more about doing things with VMware than the ordinary Oracle Consultant does.

My short presentation was focused on helping Oracle IdM customers get a handle on the top pain points that a company might encounter from an operations perspective, and I offered some insights on the challenges one will face and a VMware specific solution to the problem. In essence, if you can build your Oracle IdM foundation on VMware vSphere starting Day 1, it will lend itself to dramatic time/cost savings and speed with regards to building out new environments and horizontally scaling those environments as your business and IT infrastructure evolves.

Also, as an EMC company, VMware employees enjoy a great partnership and access to world-class tools and support for managing the Oracle database, which is the very foundation for Oracle IdM. As such, another of the practices we use at VMware, which I also discussed in the talk at OOW, is not as much VMware focused as it is on the EMC technology, but it has to be included to paint a complete picture for improving efficiency of your operations environment. Of course, some of you were quick to point out that EMC’s SRDF isn’t the only company to provide block level copy of Oracle data, we happen to think it’s a really good one worty of your consideration. For more about this process, you can view my VMworld presentation on managing Oracle data with SRDF, or you can get more from your local DBA or straight from EMC, such as EMC’s own Oracle Storage Guy.

For those of you who didn’t attend either talk or catch the link on my Twitter post, here is my OOW presentation. Being only given 30 minutes I could not go into too much technical detail here, so please forgive me. You can, however, talk with your in-house IdM Architect/Admin or IdM consultant about how you can build your Oracle IdM environment similar to the way I talk about in my presentation.

In addition to presenting at the VMworld booth I also got a chance to talk to a director at Oracle about collaborating on some white papers for publication on OTN on best practices and configuration specs for building and running Oracle IdM on VMware vSphere. There is nothing like this that I am aware of, and if there is (please share your stories with me) then this will just make it an official collaboration between VMware and Oracle. We are just getting started, and I would expect this to be available to the public sometime in Q1 of 2011. You can follow my blog’s RSS feed or my Twitter as that is where I will make the announcement when these papers are available. Another way is to check www.vmware.com/oracle for the latest updates on this collaboration.

On a final note, I received some some sad news last week on the heels of Oracle Open World that Oracle will be losing Rohit Gupta to run another company in the Bay Area. Rohit has been around the Oracle IdM space as long I can remember Oracle being in this business (circa 2005) in field enablement and product management. I got a chance to hear Rohit speak in person at Burton Catalyst this year, as the last speaker to an audience of very thirsty IT guys and a bunch of long winded corporate sponsors, he hit the grand slam with a speed 2 minutes under his allotted time with grace, humor and a technical acumen that’s refreshing coming from a VP. Rohit, you will be missed by many and I’m confident you will succeed famously at BMC as you did at Oracle. And if not, I’m sure there could be an open door for you at VMware.

Have a great week, everybody and feel free to comment here on my blog and get some conversations going about how you’ve put any of these ideas to use in your environment.

Do you want to learn how VMware manages Oracle Data and Oracle Identity Management middleware with EMC and VMware technologies? Are you curious how VMware rapidly builds new Oracle OID and Access Manager environments with it’s own products?

I will be in San Francisco at VMworld next week presenting “Automated Refresh of Oracle Data” during the Oracle Storage Guys session at VMworld. Look for Session ID: EA7061 on the topic of Creating an Internal Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere in your handbook. I will be sharing how we shaved days off our Environment Refresh processes and significantly reduced error rates using EMC’s SRDF/TimeFinder and custom scripts managed via PPM workflows to achieve greater levels of efficiency and accuracy.

It will be presented twice, so you can catch this session on Monday or Thursday at the following times.

Monday: Moscone South Room 308 @ 12:00-1:00 PM
Tursday: Moscone West Room 2007 @ 10:30-11:30 AM

Also, if you are headed to Oracle Open World in September, look for me at the VMware booth. I will be there to talk about how VMware, in addition to the EMC/SRDF solution described at VMworld for bootstrapping Oracle DB instances, uses vSphere to clone and build out new Oracle Identity Management environment. I blogged about how awesome this is awhile back, but this will give you a chance to hear a 6-month progress update and ask any questions. Stay tuned for more details on which days and times.

See you there!

But today I’m going to jump into the fray, but this is probably the only time I will do so before we have a new president in office.

I was astounded by the repeated attacks by Obama & Co. on McCain for saying that “the fundmentals of the economy are sound.”  What a laughable semantic argument this was!  It was repeated so often by the liberal media as to become meaningless, and the point might as well not have been made at all.  It made the liberal news anchors look more foolish than McCain for saying it, that believing repeating it a few hundred times would make it any more meaningful.  Nobody stays clean when you start flinging mud.  Let’s clear the room and go for a swim to cool off, and start over tomorrow morning after you have a hot meal and a restoring nights rest.

In America supposedly the majority of us are Chrstians of some kind or another.  I suppose we could debate that until the cows come home too, but I hope the common theme is faith.  So now I suppose we throw our faith out the window when it comes to American politics, but our faith is strengthened when we read about the men who God chose to run countries in ancient history within the pages of the Bible.  So why is now any different than at any point in history?  I’m not saying I love Palin/McCain – there are unfortunate choices all across the board IMO, it definitely concerns me.  But as i think about this, I feel that my responsiblity as a Christian is to live by faith and make a decision based on that faith, not what pop culture says I should do based on non-Biblical criteria for political leaders.  As the Good Book says, “I being in the way , the Lord led me”. (Genesis 24:27) 

Does that mean I don’t study the leaders and turn my nose at politics?  Aboslutely not.  I hear their arguments (unfortunately) every single day and read the news headlines just like you.  But I refuse to debate with those close minded liberals who trample any notion of conservative values under foot.  The bottom line, which usually causes a lot of eyes to roll and grief in any debates I enter is that ultimately God is in control.  So put a monkey in the White House.  Go ahead, let’s vote Obama in there.  As for me, I am more interested in seeing what God is going to do with our country than what the Obamas or the McCains are going to do with it.  Those guys think they have everything under control.  haha!  Without faith, the joke is going to be on them at the end of the day.  So, it’s easy for me to avoid all the political debating going on and just vote from my heart, not my pocket book or my career or anything else that isn’t going to matter in the end, anyways.

I had some really cool stuff to share about Palin, but I have to run off to my gate to jump on a plane.  So I’m just going to share this link with you.  http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson090608.html

I’m won’t reply or debate anybody’s comments on this post, so post at your own risk. I have more important things to do and people to love, like my little Miss Molly Jane.

Regardless where you stand on the issues, I love you anyways my fellow humans.  Word to the sweet lady, Judy, who has helped me return my Hertz rentals at the SFO for the last 18 months.  Her boss scolded her today for putting her name on a checkout cart during her break, and stealing it away from one of her co-workers after they took it away from her.  I don’t like how the young and brilliant managers at Hertz think they can harass their “subordinates” who are decades older than they are.  Treat every individual with respect and dignity you wish to be treated with.  Judy accepted (a paltry) 14 weeks of “early retirement” pay after 16 years of service with Hertz, and she thinks that she’s getting a wonderful deal.  I gave her two hugs before I walked away, and she gave me this parting advice.  The quickest route from your rental car to the Air Tram is to “Follow the yellow brick road.”  Evidently that’s universally good avice, whether you are at a Hertz rental garage or in the Emerald City.

Cheers!

-steve

I’ve been working from home for six weeks until today, and it’s been awesome to be able to spend so much time watching Molly grow and develop into the little person that she is.  So it’s with mixed emotions as I get back on the plane today and head back to “work” in the Bay Area.  This 86m flight above the clouds reveals such rich moments of reflection and clarity about life.  I know they tell you how its so safe to fly but you can’t say that the thoughts of “what if…” never cross your mind once in awhile.  I use the time to count the many blessing in my life and ponder my contributions.  It’s unfortunate that we so easily forget about the profound in the little every-day things, and often don’t make the realizations until we fly in a jet, or whatever other larger than life experiences you may participate in.

Last night I turned on the TV, expecting to watch all the latest news about the Feds stepping into the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac situation.  As I flipped through channels I was surprised to find more coverage on Tony Snow, the third White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush, than the pains being felt in the mortgage industry.  He’s a young man, older than me but younger than my parents anyways, and it was sad to me because he seems like such a great guy.  The thing that I will remember about him most is the retelling of a conversation he had with Ari Fleischer prior to his passing.  That in spite of the fact that nations operated under Tony’s watch at times throughout his career, holding prestigious positions in the White House, CNN, The O’Reily Factor, and according to some one of our nation’s “finest writers” that he recounted the best and most important times of his life were those which he spent with his children.  Those values, to me, go much deeper than partisan politics, and I hope goes appreciated by all whether democrat, republican, or independent.

On the surface, daily headlines about our economy and world relations give enough cause to be down in the dumps about life and our nation.  But don’t forget to take time out to count your blessings closer to home.  Unplug yourself from WiFi and the Blackberry for awhile, and take time to think about life and your priorities as often as you can.  It’s refreshing, and you will be glad you did it.