- More presentations May 30th, 2008
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We’re still working on getting the last missing presentations online to be available for all EIC participants. Today, for example, we have added a few.
We have also added a new “My Kuppinger Cole” page on the conference site, which provides an overview of the content available for registered users (including, of course, links to the presentations). Hopefully this would make the navigation easier, especially for returning visitors.
- Presentations and filmed materials May 1st, 2008
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We’re working hard to bring the conference materials online on our web site. More than 70 presentations and several keynote videos are already available, more will come in the following days.
We have just sent an E-mail to conference participants, which contains the link to the download area. If for some reason you haven’t received the E-mail, do not hesitate to contact us.
- And the award goes to… April 25th, 2008
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The analyst company Kuppinger Cole and Partners has for the first time awarded the European Identity Awards to honor the outstanding Identity Management projects and innovations and improvements of standards.In the “Best Innovation” category, the European Identity Award was presented to the group of companies for driving the outsourcing of authentication and authorization ahead and thus making it easier to control the application security from outside. There are several providers with different approaches in this field, and during the last year they all have contributed a lot to promoting this indispensable concept. The winners here are Bitkoo, CA, iSM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Among the finalists in the “Best innovation” category are Aveksa and Sailpoint for their Identity Risk Management solutions and Microsoft for making a significant contribution to identity information protection in distributed environments by their acquisition of of Credentica and the planned integration of U-Prove technology into the user-centric identity management.
In the “Best new/improved standard” category the European Identity Award went to the OpenID Foundation and to Microsoft for their InfoCard initiative. These standards build the foundation for Identity 2.0, the so-called user-centric identity management. Other outstanding solutions, which made into the finalist list, were eCard API Framework and the simpleSAMLphp project lead by Feide RnD. The eCard API Framework is jointly developed by Secunet and BSI (Federal Office for Security in Information Technology) to make the integration of applications using different card technologies easier. With simpleSAMLphp the federation functionality can be easily integrated into existing and new applications.
The Award in the “Best internal Identity Management project” went to BASF for their AccessIT project, which integrated identity management into the company’s complex structure and which is notable for the consistent approach to centralized auditing. The finalist is the Royal Bank of Scotland with their project to control multiple applications with integrated role management.
The award recipient in the “Best Identity Management project for B2B” is Orange/France Telecom. Their project is groundbreaking because of consistent use of federation and opening their systems to partners. Finalists include Endress+Hauser for their business customer portal and the education network SurfNET, presently one of the most comprehensive federation implementations.
The winners in the “Best Identity Management project for B2B” are eBay and Paypal for their significant contributions to the protection of online transactions by supporting strong authentication mechanisms and thus bringing the importance of the issue to the wide audience. The finalists in this category are Fun Communications for their innovative use of Infocards as virtual customer cards, which we consider groundbreaking, and KAS Bank for their consistent use of strong authentication and encryption technologies for transaction protection.
The Republic of Austria is the winner of the “Best eGovernment Project” category for their eGovernment initiatives. The Crossroads Bank and Smals and also BAMF (Federal Office for Migration and Refugees) are among the finalists for their outstanding Identity Management projects in the eGovernment field.
Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.
- Our blog is now open for all participants April 24th, 2008
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We welcome all conference participants to write their thoughts and describe their experiences in this blog.
You can create an account and start posting right away, just click here.
- KCP awards prizes to outstanding Identity Management projects and initiatives April 23rd, 2008
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With the European Identity Award the analyst company KCP Kuppinger Cole + Partner now awards for the first time Identity Management projects and initiatives at the European Identity Conference 2008 in Munich. The prizes were awarded during the evening event associated with the conference held on April 22nd, 2008.
In any of the categories
- Best innovations in Identity Management
- Best new/improved standard in Identity Management
- Best internal Identity Management project
- Best Identity Management project for B2B
- Best Identity Management project for B2C
- Best eGovernment project
three finalists were nominated from the recommended lists of initiatives and projects followed up by KCP over the last 12 months. These finalists stand out with their excellent performances in the field of Identity Management.
We will announce the finalists and winners shortly.
- Growth at the European Identity Conference 2008 April 22nd, 2008
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The 2nd European Identity Conference 2008 (EIC) taking place today is already now a great success.
Compared to last year’s event, which was a great success, this year’s conference has increased even more. This increase had become evident already prior to this event. With now about 50 exhibitors, the conference occupies an exhibition space nearly twice as big as last year. All well-known names in identity management are at EIC EXPO 2008, providing an effortless access to identity management providers in Europe on one event.
Compared to last year the number of visitors of the conference has gone up by more than 20%. The distinctive international flair of this event can be felt clearly; well over one third of all visitors not being from Germany, Austria or Switzerland are from a total of 23 different countries. The increasing interest in identity management in Eastern Europe is quite apparent as well.
The EIC 2008 is not just the meeting point in Europe but is an event for users and customers. Looking at the above-average increase of visitors from user companies it becomes evident that this is the biggest group within all participants.
With the programme being divided into five tracks, discussed by more than 130 speakers and containing more than 25 Best Practice seminars, the European Identity Conference offers the best overview not only about the trends but also about the practice of Identity Management projects. Topics like GRC (Governance, Risk Management, Compliance) and user-centric identity management, but also the integration and interaction of identity management with SOA (Service Orientated Architectures) take the centre stage.
- VRM2008 with Doc Searls January 24th, 2008
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I just got confirmation from Doc Searls, that he will be coming to VRM2008 and EIC. We therefore now officially opened registration for the VRM2008 unconference, which will be taking place on 21st April until 22nd April at the EIC location (Forum am Deutschen Museum) in Munich. Registration for VRM2008 is free of charge.
VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.
The unconference format is not yet very well known over here. Therefore a wikipedia definition: “An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event. The term is primarily used in the geek community. “
- Identity (Risk) Management and Metrics January 23rd, 2008
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One of the emerging topics in Identity Management is Identity Risk Management. An important part of this are Identity Risk Metrics, e.g. defined metrics for the risks which are related to digital identities. That isn’t limited to security and compliance risks, but includes cost and performance risks as well. Identity Risk Metrics thus are an interesting tool not only to manage risks but to measure and optimize IT.
If you focus on aspects like performance risks then you can discuss whether it is really about risks – or, in general, about improvements in IT. The approach of Identity Risk Management and the related metrics can be easily expanded to an approach of IT metrics and thus be used to measure and improve IT.
Our Workshop on Identity Risk Management to be held on April 25th will discuss the potential of Identity Risk Metrics in depth, showing how this concept can be used to not only show risks but to gain business values and improve IT.
- The real relationship of BSM and IAM January 23rd, 2008
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BSM, e.g. Business Service Management, is one of today’s most important buzzwords in IT. It’s related to ITIL and ISO 20000, thus it is about managing IT and the IT processes. BSM is definitely more than the former systems management, but currently it is – in most cases – IT service management and not business service management. That’s because the focus is on IT services and not on business services.
Let me explain this in the context of IAM. If you use a virtual directory to define “identity storage services” which abstract the physical identity stores like directories from the applications you provide services. These can be managed in the BSM paradigm, following for example the ITIL v3 approaches. But in that case you provide IT services. A business service, in contrast, shall start at the business level. Take a contract and define how it is handled in IT. A business service defines proper contract handling, e.g. how it is stored, how it is archived, how information rights are applied to shield the contract, who is allowed to access it in which way and so on. Thus you could define such a business service which involves many different IT services. But in most cases, today’s business service management is far away from that level – it focuses on IT service management (ITSM), a buzzword which is used less often than BSM…
The second interesting aspect of relationship between IAM and BSM is about the question whether there is any advantage of buying IAM from the BSM vendor. There might be, for sure: Enterprise license contracts, sometimes familiar architectures and interfaces, trust in the vendor, and other advantages a single-vendor-strategy offers. But sometimes BSM vendors try to convince me that there are advantages due to the tight integration of their IAM offering in the BSM offering. That’s an interesting position. If there were such an advantage it could only be because the BSM doesn’t optimally integrate different existing technologies. But BSM has to support all the services from all systems, hasn’t it? Thus is should support identity services from any identity management solution, regardless of the vendor. A BSM for (only or mainly) a vendor’s own tools isn’t sufficient.
Given this, it might make sense to buy IAM from your BSM vendor because of the general advantages mentioned above. But it shouldn’t be because the BSM vendors IAM is the only one to be managed by the vendors BSM. Then you should rethink the BSM decision, honestly spoken.
This relationship and some other interesting aspects of the BSM market will be discussed on April 25th at the BSM forum which will be held first time as part of the European Identity Conference 2008 – a BSM forum which obviously is around BSM and IAM. More about the specific topics and the speakers to be announced soon…
- Federation & User Centric Showcase - Call for Proposals November 5th, 2007
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During the 2nd European Identity Conference, a business-oriented showcase will demonstrate, how information flows to, from and about individuals will be changed by federation and user centric related standards and innovations, if applied to existing and new business models. We strongly encourage all exhibitors to propose applications and service models for this showcase. The purpose of it is not just to demonstrate interoperability, as this is already part of the federation and user centric concepts. It is to show real world applications and business models taking advantage of what makes federation and user centric technologies so different to classical/legacy infrastructures for conducting business and providing social interaction b2b, c2b and c2c.
Kuppinger Cole will collect your proposals and moderate your collaboration with the other participants of this showcase, so that each single element of such an infrastructure will contribute to the picture as a whole.
Some examples we would like to see in this showcase:
- Identity Routing (virtual directories)
- Cross-community collaboration
- OpenID and CardSpace business models
- “Trust-Providers” and “Identity Agents”
- Virtual ID Cards
- Open Source Solutions
- Post-CRM applications (i.e. Vendor Relationship Management VRM)
If you would like to propose a contribution, just email Joerg Resch: jr@kuppingercole.de
