User Centric Interop Event was a Great Success

Last night was the user centric interop at Burton Catalyst. BMC was there with an Information Card enabled Relying Party. We showed a web site integrated with our Identity Federation Manager, which was customized to use Information Cards for authentication.

That was my seventh public interop event (I had previously participated in six SPML, SAML, Liberty, and WS-Fed events). I can sum up the results as:

Wow

That was the smoothest interop event I have ever participated in. I think that is in part because Microsoft Cardspace served as benchmark to test against. Also there was a lot of on-line testing that went on even before we all got together so the final demo set up was relatively easy.

The demo was well attended and I talked to a lot of people at user centric identity. There was a lot of excitement about the subject, but I did notice one thing. Many people I talked to had trouble thinking of a compelling business case that would make sense for their business. I can understand that since this stuff is really quite new. To help with this I am going to be blogging about some easy wins with user centric identity that companies can now.

I want to that all the vendors and open source organizations that participated for making this such a success. I want to especially thank the following, in no particular order:

Oracle for donating the use of the monitors.

Microsoft for donating the network, food, and drinks.

The Burton Group (especially Gerry Gebel and Bob Blakely) for organizing the event and providing the venue.

And special thanks to Kim Cameron for the vision that got the whole thing rolling.