SOA approach to manage Identity

You know I joined HP only 6 months ago and before that worked for Novell for 6 years. I have only in the last couple of weeks started to appreciate the beauty of HP’s identity offering. It is quite revolutionary as it is SOA integrated. This means that nothing is bolted on, e.g. workflow, RBAC, that the other traditional X.500 directory vendors are having to do today in order to meet the strong requirements for regulatory compliance. HP’s Select Identity is a Service Orientated architecture.

With many years experience with directories, I am a hardened X.500 expert, so was quite shocked when I first looked at the HP products for identity management. However, now I’ve got it! It is extremely cool. It reminds me of what Novell did about 15 years ago when they turned the ‘bindery’ login (NetWare) into a directory login (with NDS), was quite revolutionary at that time and didn’t take off to start with because people just didn’t get it. Of course once people did ‘get it’ other vendors jumped on the X.500 bandwagon too include MS with AD. Anyone wishing to dispute which was the first x.500 directory vendor on the market -maybe it was Sun with their LDAP directory?.. you are welcome to comment 😉

If you will be at InfoSec Europe next week be sure to visit the HP stand and ask them about their identity offering. You maybe surprised to find that HP has become such a key player in identity management over the last couple of years. That is why they employed me!

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