I have failed to communicate

Clayton Donley of Oracle makes some excellent points here about my “Elephant in the Room” post.  But I have apparently done a poor job in communicating the whole point of the post. In his post:

What I think his post misses is the fact that most LDAP access in most applications is poorly written, even when using ADSI or ADO to talk natively to Active Directory. I can’t count the number of virtual directory deployments that we’ve sold to help customers in environments that were nearly 100% Microsoft (ADO/ADSI-enabled apps talking to Microsoft AD). Many of these deployments were to get around bad schema assumptions, others were to get around topology issues or forest boundary issues.

While we sell virtual directory technology, we hate making our customers pay money to solve such tactical issues. We want to be layering on higher-order value.

So when Phil Hunt or others talk about the Liberty IGF project, what they’re really saying is that we want a better way to give application developers a way to code something in a way they understand and can do well rather than a native access protocol that requires specialization. So while LDAP isn’t going away and everything from virtual directories to identity buses will need to support native access over LDAP to be successful, not looking at what developers are learning and using every day would be a mistake.

Keep in mind that developers must integrate with a LOT of technologies to build an enterprise application or portal. For example, a portal may be integrating with HR, CRM, and ERP systems. That integration is increasingly happening via web services. Giving these developers a mandate to use a completely different type of technology to integrate identity will only make identity more specialized and less standardized and understood over time. That is a recipe for disaster.

I did not mean to imply LDAP was a better choice that Liberty IGF. I was in fact the BMC rep to Liberty TEG and am very supportive of their work. I also agree there are a lot of problems with LDAP and how developers use it.

But having been involved at some level in the standardization efforts of DAML, XRPM, DSML v2, SPML, SAML, WSDM, OATH, Liberty, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, and WS-Federation. I have spent a lot of time working on identity service standards and developing implementations of those standards at several different companies.

But the hardest thing is getting adoption of these standards. The point of my post was not to suggest that standards for identity services other than LDAP aren’t a good thing. The point was that to drive adoption you have to accept the reality that AD and other LDAPs have the predominant mind-share today.

To many enterprises, LDAP is their one identity hammer. And they see all their identity problems as nails. If we want them to put down the LDAP hammer and pick up the IGF pneumatic impact wrench, we have to explain to him in real world business cases why it’s better. Because they  know the LDAP hammer will work and they already have it in their tool box. The IGF pneumatic impact wrench is a strange new tool to him that they must first understand and second justify purchasing.

Of course AD isn’t all identity in an enterprise. But for extranet identities you will have to justify why IGF or some other identity service is better than just throwing in an ADAM, OID,  or OpenLDAP instance. Or even a virtual directory like OVD or OptimalIdM VIS (for the .NET centric customer). The enterprise architects know they already have a wide variety of tools and APIs to leverage LDAP. They don’t yet have those for IGF and other identity services.

Bottom line – identity services will not reach the level of adoption to where you could say there is an “Identity Bus” until there are compelling business cases made for it. Enterprises not only have to adopt the identity service standards, but they need to make vendor support of those standards a selection criterion to drive adoption.